Scottish film star Brian Cox slammed religion for leading humanity into “all kinds of horror” on Monday.
During an episode of The Starting Line podcast, the self-described atheist-socialist actor asserted that religion has hurt humans’ ability to face reality, contributing to their own “stupidity.”
“It’s all about this notion of God, the idea that there’s a God that takes care of us all,” he told Starting Line host Rich Leigh. “There’s no such thing, doesn’t happen, that’s not what it’s about. It’s about us, and we don’t examine ourselves nearly enough.”
“We don’t look at who we are,” he continued. “We’re always looking outside of ourselves, instead of looking inside ourselves.”
“The word ‘God’ anyway, is a conceit,” he said. “It’s a terrible conceit that we don’t really acknowledge.”
Cox, who plays the odious billionaire media mogul Logan Roy in the HBO hit series Succession, described the Bible as “one of the worst books ever.”
“It is not the truth, it’s a mythology,” he said. “We’ve created that idea of God, and we’ve created it as a control issue, and it’s also a patriarchal issue… and it’s essentially patriarchal — we haven’t given enough scope to the matriarchy.”
Humans “simply haven’t evolved” to the point where we look inside ourselves to deal with our problems rather than trying to solve them with religion, he contended.
“Human beings are so fucked, basically… because they’re so stupid,” he said.
Cox described his own mother’s struggle with mental illness, which he attributed to her faith and religious belief that was “always failing her.”
“She accepted what her religious faith had told her, rather than just say, ‘No, be an agnostic, be a heathen, that’s fine, just go with that,’” Cox recalled:
She lost, for a while, then she got it back, which I thought was unfortunate, but she lost her faith for a while then she got it back, because I think you can go back to any sort of twig that’s possible to get out of the water that you can hang onto and that twig happened to be her faith and it worked for her.
Religion has led us into “all kinds of horror,” he declared, referencing the Holocaust and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. “The same things are being repeated again and again in belief systems which do not serve.”
The conflict in the Middle East is “never going to go away,” he said, because it is fueled by these faulty systems that hurt both Muslims and Jews.
In the interview, Cox said he has found his answers to life’s big questions through acting, arguing that the “one true church” is the theater because it is “the church of humanity.”