In an interview to be broadcast on Irish TV, English actor and author Stephen Fry didn’t mince words about what he would say to God if he died and went to heaven, calling him “capricious, mean-minded, and stupid.”

Speaking with host Gay Byrne on the RTÉ show ‘The Meaning of Life,’ Fry stunned the venerable TV personality by launching into a scathing attack on God, when asked what he would say if faced with the deity.

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“Suppose it’s all true, and you walk up to the pearly gates and you are confronted by God” Byrne asked a smiling Fry. “What would Stephen Fry say to him, her, or it?”

“I think I’d say ‘Bone cancer in children? What’s that about? How dare you! 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,’ ” an animated Fry replied. “Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?”

The clearly disturbed Byrne then asked him, “And you think you’re going to get in?”

“No, but I wouldn’t want to. I wouldn’t want to get in on his terms. They’re wrong.” Fry replied. “Now, if I died and it was Pluto, Hades, if it was the 12 Greek gods, then I would have more truck with it. Because the [Greek gods] were – they didn’t pretend not to be human in their appetites, and in their capriciousness, and in their unreasonableness. They didn’t present themselves as being all-seeing, all-wise, all-kind, all-beneficent.”

Fry was only warming up, and continued, “The [Christian] God who created this universe — if it was created by God — is quite clearly an utter maniac. Totally selfish. We have to spend our life on our knees, thanking him? What kind of God would do that? Yes, the world is very splendid. But it also has in it insects whose whole life-cycle is to burrow into the eyes of children and make them blind. They eat outwards from the eyes. Why? Why did you do that to us? You could easily have made a creation in which that did not exist. It is simply not acceptable.”

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Watch the video below, uploaded to YouTube by RTE:

H/T The Friendly Atheist.