Going beyond God

I'm curious about how these issues have played out in your own life because you went into a convent at a rather young age -- at 17. You lived there for seven years. You've written about how you tried to find God but couldn't. And you left in despair. I don't know if you called yourself an atheist, but you were certainly close to that. And then, as you worked on your book, "A History of God," you seemed to discover something that you hadn't known before.

I couldn't get on with religion in the convent because it was a very unkind institution. I limped away from it. I wanted nothing to do with religion ever again, but came back to it through the study of other religious traditions -- initially, Judaism and Islam. Later, Buddhism, Hinduism and Confucianism.

So it was actually studying the history and the texts that allowed you to enter into the religious experience.

Yes, once I'd stopped prancing and posturing around on TV, where I was expected to have an inflammatory opinion and to let people have it. All this was pure egotism. I did some early television programs and expressed my secularism very cleverly. I'm slightly down on cleverness, which can be fun and witty at a dinner party and I enjoy that as much as anybody else. But it can be superficial. Once my television career had folded, I was left on my own with these texts. There was nobody to exclaim derisively about the irrationality of a Greek Orthodox text or the stupidity of a certain Jewish mysticism. I began to read them like poetry, which is what theology is. It's poetry. It's an attempt to express the inexpressible. It needs quiet. You can't read a Rilke sonnet at a party. Sometimes a poem can live in your head for a long time until its meaning is finally revealed. And if you try and grasp that meaning prematurely, you can distort the poem for yourself. And because I'd been cast out from the media world, and was living in a world of silence and solitude, the texts and I started to have a different relationship.

Do you consider yourself a religious person?

Yes. It's a constant pursuit for me. It's helped me immeasurably to overcome despair in my own life. But I have no hard and fast answers.

I take it you don't like the question, do you believe in God?

No, because people who ask this question often have a rather simplistic notion of what God is.

What about an afterlife?

It's a red herring as far as I'm concerned.

But you must have thought about that question. Does everything end once we die?

I don't know. I prefer to be agnostic on that matter, as do most of the world's religions. It's really only Christianity and Islam that are obsessed with afterlife in this way. It was not a concern in the Axial Age, not for any of them. I think the old scenarios of heaven and hell can be unreligious. People can perform their good deeds in the spirit of putting their installments in their retirement annuities. And there's nothing religious about that. Religion is supposed to be about the loss of the ego, not about its eternal survival.

But certainly there are a lot of people -- both scientists and religious people -- who speculate about whether there's some cosmic order. For the evolutionary biologists, the question is whether there's some natural progression to evolution.

Who knows?

And is there an endpoint? From the cosmological perspective, was the universe designed specifically for life? Are those important questions?

Yeah, I think they can be wonderful questions. But they don't occupy me very much. I believe that what we have is now. The religions say you can experience eternity in this life, here and now, by getting those moments of ecstasy where time ceases to be a constraint. And you do it by the exercise of the Golden Rule and by compassion. And just endless speculation about the next world is depriving you of a great experience in this one.

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