I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but on the comedy circuit now, it’s incredibly cool to be an atheist. I was in Edinburgh recently and I saw several comedians’ shows, and even if they were nothing to do with religion, they’ll take a little three or four minute slot and say, oh, by the way, I’m an atheist, just to make sure they’ve ticked the box of cool comic. You have to wear tight jeans, you have to have hair that looks like a chrysanthemum and you have to be an atheist if you want to be a cool modern comic.

Now, you need to sort that out. [Audience laughter]

It’s very bad that being an atheist has got to be the cool position, because that could be very serious as an end result. We might see atheists like we see people who deny global warming. You might celebrate their freedom of speech and their opinion to deny global warming, but if they’re wrong and millions of other people have taken their view, then it could end in a terrible, terrible disaster for a lot of people. And the church just seems to be letting it get cooler and letting it dominate more and more.