Iain Banks

“My mother brought me up to some point as a Christian, just to go to church and Sunday school. I mean, the amount of lapsed Catholics I’ve known who still had the guilt trip, the fear of god, it must be horrible. But for years I just thought that dads didn’t go to church. I assumed that the men there were...brothers or something. So one day I said, ‘Dad, why don’t you go to church?’ He says ‘Well, I don’t believe in god!’ Seemed a perfectly reasonable response. ‘Oh, why not?’ So he went into it etc. Very soon after that I decided it was a crock of shit basically. I think the worst thing you can do to a child, actually. Hey! Great idea, to fuck up your kids! Send them away as soon as they can walk to a boarding school somewhere to be thrashed to within an inch of their lives, sexually molested by older boys, whatever, or another way is just to bring them up in a religion that’s basically in love with death, y’know, all these wee sick ideas like original sin. Yeah, spoil their entire fucking lives, that’ll teach ‘em.”

“In a sense, [the Culture is] a kind of religion ‘that is not religion,’ a true way of looking at reality. Appreciating where you are and what you are doing, what your place is in the universe. I did a Horizon 20^th anniversary programme and one thing I wanted to get across was that science can actually replace religion – is in the process of doing so. When people say, ‘ah, but there’s no spiritual dimension to this...’ Bullshit. Often when people talk about spirituality it’s a quest for context, an answer to ‘what is my place in the universe?’ Religion is politics, keeping people working to provide the clergy with the goodies, so they don’t have to work at all, and what I am trying to say is, science can say ‘this is what it’s about – you exist here because...’ It’s so much more impressive, the things we’ve come up with, ideas, answers to questions like ‘what is the state of the universe?’ Well, it was born at least 15 billion years ago with one gigantic big bang. Every single iron-atom in our bodies was born in the furnace of the first generation of mega-stars that blew up, they created iron in their cores, became unstable, blew up, became supernovas, the ejecta from those titanic explosions, only bettered by the big bang itself, went out into the next galaxy, clumped together because of gravity, became the solar system; a tiny amount of the solar system became the planets, the rest was like the sun and every atom in your body was born in the furnaces of those stars. No religion has come up with anything so stunning.”

“Banks is, in his own words, an “evangelical atheist”, who views religion as politics.
“Religion is a way of making people behave in a certain way in society. It’s giving you little on-board, in-built sensors that make you not think certain things or at the very least, feel guilty about having thought them. Obviously religion wouldn’t have survived if it hadn’t to some extent been beneficial to society and to a large extent it has been. The problem comes when people extend the principle of ‘well, I’ve been told this, therefore I must behave in a certain way,’ to ‘lo! The infidels, let’s kill them, put [them] to the sword, they don’t think the same way we do.’”

“Science is the religion that works” and science fiction is like its hymn book.”

“My attitude towards people in cults sort of says it all, I think they’re stupid fucking idiots. Absolutely stupid. That goes for organised religions too, those long-term cults, the ones considered safe. Absolutely stupid.”

“Really, it's not about you. It's what religion does with this drive for acknowledgement of self-importance that really gets up my nose. 'Yeah, yeah, your individual consciousness is so important to the universe that it must be preserved at all costs' – oh, please. Do try to get a grip of something other than your self-obsession. How Californian. The idea that at all costs, no matter what, it always has to be all about you. Well, I think not."

“Religion is still in retreat in a sense, it’s taken heroic efforts of crass stupidity to try and justify the so-called Creation Science argument in America, which is patently ludicrous; they’re doing their damnedest, but ultimately they’re going to lose. Science just keeps doing things that religion only claims it can do – talking over long distances, live longer, live better, science can do that, religion can’t, simple as that. When you’re young you think within your lifetime it’s all going to be better; as you get older that’s one of these great disillusioning things is realising every generation starts out stupid just like you did! But as I say, as long as there are libraries, as long as there is education, as long as there is civilisation itself, there’s always hope.”