Well, thank you so much for that.

Thank you so much for inviting me back to the Opera House.

I remember the first time I spoke here,

I thought, "This is definitely going to be the last time,"

but it's now, I think, even my fourth time here,

so it's an incredibly generous gesture on the part

not only of the Opera House

but also of the whole city of Sydney.

I can't thank you enough.

What I want to talk about today is my new book

and the themes that underlie it,

and I guess it's worth saying that throughout my career,

I've been in search of guidance.

I don't believe that the business of living

is very obvious.

It's not very obvious to me.

On a daily basis, I'm reminded of how little I know

and how things are extremely complicated

and don't necessarily have easy answers.

And this has led me to look in a number of different areas

for what I could broadly call wisdom.

I've looked at the world of philosophy.

I've looked at the world of literature,

of art, of sociology,

and then a few years ago, I began to be interested

in the field of religion.

Now, this surprised me as much as anyone else

because I didn't happen to believe anything,

and still don't believe anything,

and in our society, we assume, naturally,

that those who don't believe

won't really care very much for religion

and won't be able to see anything in it,

but I suppose my whole argument is

that that's perhaps not entirely true.

One of the major divisions of the world nowadays

is between those who believe and those who don't,

between atheists, or agnostics, and believers,

and for about the last, I would say, 10 years or so,

it's been relatively clear, in the minds of many,

what being an atheist means.

Being an atheist means someone

who not only believes that God doesn't exist,

but it also means someone

who thinks that anyone who believes that God does exist

is a simpleton.

(LAUGHTER)

Or an idiot, to put it more politely.

So, in other words,

a rather virulent kind of atheism stalks the land

that essentially believes

that there is something quite wrong with believers.

They are not simply making another choice.

They made very much the wrong choice

and need their errors pointed out to them

in intellectual ways.

They've made an intellectual error,

and therefore, they need an intellectual corrective.

I've got a few quibbles with this,

and my approach is slightly different.

I don't believe

that the question of God's existence or non-existence

is the most interesting one in this topic.

In fact, I think it's incredibly boring and sterile,

because one never really makes any headway.

You know, on the one hand, you've got the believers,

who think the atheists are going to hell,

and on the other hand, you've got the atheists,

who think that the believers are rather stupid,

and that kind of divide is, for me, painful and sad,

and I don't really want to dwell on it.

So I'm taking a different road.

For me, I am an atheist, and so I want to begin, really, now

with something which may surprise you,

and if you feel very strongly about it,

please make your ways to the exit,

and I won't hold any grudges,

but, you know, let's be honest with each other.

I don't think God exists.

Now, let's move on.

-(LAUGHTER) -If we can.

I think that's the end of the matter.

-Now, the greater question is... -(LAUGHTER)

..where...

The greater question is, where are we gonna go from here?

Now we've settled that question, where are we gonna go from here?

How are we going to live a good life? How is our society...

How are our societies to be managed

with that insight in mind?

And I suppose I'm writing for someone

who's a little bit like me, who thinks something like this.

I don't believe in the doctrines of religion,

but I do like singing Christmas carols,

and I quite like some of the passages of the Old Testament,

and I love the music of Bach,

and there's something about Zen Buddhist temples,

and there's something about the moral structure

that you find in certain religions, etc, etc.

You know the sort of person - someone who cannot believe

but is attracted to aspects of religion.

Now, for too long, the choice has been either

you sign up to all the doctrines,

involving many supernatural incidents, etc,

and then you get all those nice bits,

or you find you can't sign up to these doctrines,

and then you're left in a sort of wasteland,

where there's a lot that isn't really attended to.

I want to suggest a different strategy.

I want to suggest it not just for myself

but, as it were, for our own times,

and that's a strategy of stealing from religions,

that atheists should learn to inform themselves

about what religions are up to

and then selectively steal the best bits.

Now, this has been described to me sometimes

as a bit of a pick-and-mix approach,

and the truth is, that's exactly what it is,

and I'm very, very proud of pick-and-mix

when it comes to religion.

Some people say, you know,

I've rifled through the buffet of religions.

Well, that's great. I think that religions are a buffet.

They lie before us, and a lot of what you might put on your plate

is, to my eyes, not that appetising.

But there are some really lovely bits,

so I'm gonna go round with my plate

around some major religions and pick the nicest bits,

in my eyes.

That is my overt strategy.

I don't mean to offend,

but I think that if you'd believe, as I do,

that religions are essentially cultural products,

that they were made by humans,

then there seems to be nothing wrong with choosing among them

like one would with any work of culture.

I mean, imagine... Take music.

You know, imagine you like the Beatles,

and somebody said, "Oh, right, you like the Beatles,

"so I hope you're committed to the Beatles

"and will listen to every single track

"and never deviate and make no time for,

"you know, "Robbie Williams,

"because, really, you must stick to the Beatles,"

that would seem bizarre.

We naturally rifle through the buffet of cultures,

be it in music or in literature -

you can go from a bit of Jane Austen to a bit of Shakespeare

to a bit of James Joyce, and that's allowed.

You can create a playlist.

And that's what I want to suggest

that contemporary society can do as regards religion too.

So, what I want to do tonight is take you through the buffet

and show you the bits that I'm picking.

You may want to pick out other bits.

What I'm trying to show you is a method, and...

'Cause I think at the end of the day,

the method is more important than particular choices, but...

Let me take you through some of these choices.

So one area that I think religions are fascinating in

is the area of education.

Now, education is something that the secular world

prides itself on taking very seriously.

Huge amounts of money are devoted to education, and...

Now, the question is, what is education for?

Well, when politicians talk about it,

the prime explanation is that education will provide us

with the skills necessary to take up a place

in modern capitalism.

So education will give us technical and business skills

to make our societies richer and safer.

But there's another claim that you often hear made

on behalf of modern education,

and you sometimes catch it during the more lyrical moments

of politicians' speeches

or at the end of graduation ceremonies.

And that's the suggestion that education can, in some ways,

make you into a better human being,

a fuller, richer, nobler person -

it can make you into a grown-up citizen.

Now, I like those claims.

I think they do sound rather beautiful.

And I want to explore them, because I think in some ways,

we've failed to honour that second claim

associated with education,

and I think we've partly failed to honour it

because we've forgotten about religion.

Let me explain.

In the 19th century, in the UK,

church attendance started falling off a cliff.

In the middle of the 19th century,

the numbers really collapsed year by year.

And this set off a real panic amongst many people,

who wondered where on earth society was going to find

its sources of consolation, its ethical framework,

its guidance, its morality -

where were these things gonna be found?

They had been the preserve of religion.

Where were they gonna be found?

Now, there was one influential group

among whom you might call the chattering classes of Britain

who came up with a fascinating answer.

People like John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold suggested

that there was a ready-made replacement for religion,

and that replacement was called, with a capital 'C', Culture,

works of culture, ranging from the essays of Plato,

the plays of Shakespeare, the novels of Jane Austen -

they comprised a corpus of knowledge and wisdom

that could do very much all the things

that religions have traditionally done.

They too could be sources of guidance,

of morality, of consolation.

In other words, culture can replace Scripture.

That was the dream of a certain kind of reformer

in the mid-19th century.

Now, I actually think this was a really good idea.

I fervently believe that culture can get us through

some of the great challenges of our life.

I'd add a few more things, like cinema

and photography and music,

but all of these things together are vital tools to a good life,

and I think these reformers were absolutely right.

The problem is that that insight

has fallen entirely by the wayside

as regards the modern educational establishment.

I mean, imagine if you went to any university, in Australia,

or even anywhere in the world - say you went to Harvard,

apparently the best university -

and you said, "Look, I've come to study at Harvard

"because I want to find a moral framework.

"I need ethical guidance.

"I need to learn how to love, to live and to die."

The administration people

would start looking at you so strangely,

they'd be dialling up the ambulance,

if not the insane asylum.

This is simply not what the modern educational system

believes it's in the business of doing.

It doesn't believe that it's providing ethical guidance,

a moral framework or consolation.

And the reason it doesn't is that it assumes that people,

once they've become adults,

sort of know how to live.

It's a fairly obvious business, knowing how to live.

You know, you get up in the morning

and you find a life partner and you have children,

you find a job that you like

and you watch your parents die and your friends get ill,