Brian Cox recently spoke to The Starting Line Podcast, and let’s just say he kept it on-brand. Cox calls himself a socialist and an anti-monarchist, yet he does events with Queen Camilla and he adored his role as a grumpy billionaire on Succession. The man is complicated. Often, he’ll start out by saying something sort of righteous and cool, then he keeps going, confuses himself, loses the plot and ends up offending people. That’s what happened on this podcast, from the looks of things. Some quotes:

Whether religion holds humanity back: “Oh considerably, yes – I think religion does hold us back because it’s belief systems which are outside ourselves. They’re not dealing with who we are, we’re dealing with, ‘Oh if God says this and God does that’, and you go, ‘Well what is God?’ We’ve created that idea of God, and we’ve created it as a control issue, and it’s also a patriarchal issue … and it’s essentially patriarchal – we haven’t given enough scope to the matriarchy. And I think we need to move matriarchally, we have to go more towards a matriarchy.”

Women know more because they’re mothers: “We haven’t given enough scope to the matriarchy. And I think we need to move matriarchally, we have to go more towards a matriarchy because the mothering thing is the thing which is the real conditioning of our lives. Our fathers don’t condition us, they’re too bloody selfish, but our mothers have to, because they have an umbilical – that’s what the umbilical cord is about …Even though it’s cut away, there’s an umbilical relationship to your child, and the women have that. Men do not have that, they’re just sperm banks, moveable sperm banks.”

The Bible sucks: “It’s Adam and Eve, I mean the propaganda goes right way back – the Bible is one of the worst books ever, for me, from my point of view. Because it starts with the idea that Adam’s rib – you know that [from] Adam’s rib, this woman was created, and they’ll believe it cause they’re stupid enough.”

People need spirituality but it should not be derived from religion. “[People] need it, but they don’t need to be told lies, they need some kind of truth, and that is not the truth. It is not the truth, it’s a mythology you know … it’s not really to do with what women understand more than anybody.”

[From Farout Magazine & Yahoo]

Yeah, I think many religions are patriarchal propaganda as well, but the whole thing about a matriarchial society and the umbilical cord… yeesh. I know what he was aiming for, at least I think I know. He’s trying to say that women have more of a connection with spirituality and the world around them because of their biology, because of motherhood, etc? Right? He’s saying we should move away from the patriarchal systems, especially in religion? Or am I totally off base? That’s what I mean about Cox sort of loses the plot sometimes. That being said, he’s right that the Bible is a terrible book!

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.