Hello and welcome to Under the Skin from Luminary. This week, we are taking a significant issue

and presenting opposing views. And we've chosen the subject of whether or not there's a God. Is

there one? Finally, we're going to come to a conclusion by presenting you with two arguments,

Ricky Javace versus the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell. I think we've created a brilliant

podcast for you here. Ricky Javace, as always, is lucid and funny. Sometimes two comedians talking

can get pretty serious and there are certainly moments like that. Bishop Stephen Cottrell,

I became interested in him because he wrote a book about the artist Stanley Spencer, who depicts

Christ in ordinary settings, literally ordinary, the village of Cuckham, which is pretty near,

where I live. He was always drawing Christ down by the river or Christ in the town centre,

which at that time qualified as a kind of surrealism, but actually is a way of making

Christ present and relevant. And that, in a sense, is perhaps part of what surrealism is,

introducing the divine or sublime through imagery into ordinary settings, or at least it's about

inverting and flexing the boundaries of what is normal. And you can certainly see how many

religious ideas do that. Anyway, I hope you're going to enjoy this podcast. This is a shout out.

This is what people have been saying about our last episode, Victoria. She said,

that interview with Noam Chomsky was so bloody good. What he was saying about doing good things

just because where the ideas we live our lives came from. Shit, man, I'm so glad this interview

exists. So much love to you. Cheers, Victoria. What I thought was, well, I'll tell you something

practical about that episode with Noam Chomsky is he was, everything I said was transcripted in

the corner of his screen. So I suddenly became extremely self conscious about everything I was

saying. Like, I don't have that feeling right now. But when I couldn't, I saw him reading it.

So I thought, oh, no, this guy's like 93. I can't waste his time. I've got to be succinct. So

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