Stephen Fry’s declaration that ‘God is a maniac’ viewed 4m times

A clip in which Stephen Fry describes God as “quite clearly a maniac”, “totally selfish”, and “monstrous” has been viewed more than 4m times on YouTube.

A long-time atheist, Mr Fry was speaking to Gay Byrne on RTÉ’s The Meaning of Life, when he was asked what he might say to God on arrival in heaven.

The English writer, actor, and presenter said: “I’ll 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. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?’ That’s what I’d say.”

Mr Fry said, even if it was proven that heaven and God existed, he would not want to get in on such terms.

“Because the god who created this universe, if it was created by God, is quite clearly a maniac, utter maniac, totally selfish,” said Mr Fry. “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 has in it insects whose whole life cycle is to burrow into the eyes of children and make them blind. It eats outwards from the eyes. Why? Why did you do that to us? You could easily have made a creation in which that didn’t exist. It is simply not acceptable.”

Mr Fry said the “moment you banish him [God], your life becomes simpler, purer, cleaner, more worth living in my opinion”.

A tweet by the actor linking to the clip, in which he acknowledges giving “poor old god a bit of a kicking” has been retweeted more than 3,500 times and favourited more than 4,800 times.

Speaking on RTÉ radio, Mr Byrne said he was surprised by the reaction to the clip, as the show had featured atheists before.

“Everybody is getting much more excited about this thing than I am because we’ve had a good number of people on the programme down through the years and we’ve done a lot of programmes with many people expressing atheistic views and beliefs and views on God and so on,” said Mr Byrne.

“This time we happened to have a man who is a particularly good speaker, particularly robust at expressing his views.”