“Suppose it’s all true,” began a question to Stephen Fry on Irish television, “and you walk up to the pearly gates and you are confronted by God. What will Stephen Fry say to Him, Her or It?”

Fry, a beloved actor and comedian in Britain, began his reply like this: “Bone cancer in children? What’s that about? How dare you.”

Fry is also a humanist.

He continued: “How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault. It’s not right. It’s utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world that is so full of injustice and pain?”

When asked whether he believed such a response would get him into heaven, Fry replied that he wasn’t interested in going to heaven according to the terms of the sort of God he had just described.

“It’s perfectly apparent that he is monstrous,” he said. “Utterly monstrous and deserves no respect whatsoever. The moment you banish him, life becomes simpler, purer, cleaner, more worth living in my opinion.”…

Ireland … [has] a blasphemy law that comes with the punishment of a potentially massive fine (up to a 25,000 pounds, or roughly $38,000).

But it has an exception for instances where “a reasonable person would find genuine literary, artistic, political, scientific, or academic value in the matter to which the offence relates” — and Ireland has never prosecuted anyone under that law, according to the International Humanist and Ethical Union’s annual “Freedom of Thought” report.