but the landmark victory against the militants has led to the deaths of thousands of civilians and driven almost a million people from their homes. president trump has faced criticism from members of his own republican party after revealing he proposed setting up a joint cyber security unit with russia. mr trump said he had asked president putin about establishing an impenetrable unit to combat election hacking. more than 100 thousand people have taken part in an anti—government demonstration in turkey's biggest city, istanbul. turkey's main opposition leader criticised the wave of arrests and jailings that followed last year's failed coup — and said turks were living under a dictatorship. now as part of hardtalk‘s 20th anniversary season, another chance to see an interview first broadcast in 2013. welcome to hardtalk.

i'm alan little. my guest today is the former bishop of edinburgh, richard holloway. he entered a seminary at the age 01:14, intent on becoming a monk. he rose to become the leader of the anglican church in scotland. but he gradually lost faith in many of the certainties in christianity, including the existence of god. he finally resigned from the church, accusing it of cruelly persecuting gay people. so did his own loss of faith betray those he once preached to? richard holloway, welcome to hardtalk. at the age 01:14, you left your working—class home in the west

of scotland and went off to a very austere place in england called kelham hall, to train as an anglican priest. to train, in effect, as a monk. what was that like? it was lovely. i was a romantic wee boy who wandered the hills at loch lomond, where i grew up. the hills give you a sense of beyondness, of otherness, but that was also related to me and the kind of love for western movies, this idea of the lonely hero riding on and rescuing. i got kind of bitten by that. then i was discovered by the local priest of the episcopal church. my wee cousin died, he invited me to join the choir. the beauty of it somehow consumed me. he talked about the given—away life, this mystical thing called a vocation that some people had, to give themselves to a great purpose. i went to him when i was 13 and said tentatively, i thought maybe i was hearing this call to give myself away to some

great purpose called the priesthood, the given—away life, the surrendered life, the lonely hero. he said, well, we'll send you to this place. i was due to leave school at 14. there's a monastery in england that trains poor boys for the anglican priesthood. it was a wonderful place. it was a kindly, eccentric, mad place. these lovely old monks trained us. not very well, they weren't trained teachers. it deeply embedded itself in my psyche. but it was a strange disruption, from a random street in alexandria, to this big manner, some mansion house on the banks of the trent. you say in your book, leaving alexandria, the name of the town you grew up in, that you were looking for something called transcendence. what do you understand by that? i think we're all, to some extent, i think we human animals are very strange creatures. we're not comfortably embedded in nature, the way my wee dog is, or cows in the hills are, or kangaroos in the outback. we're conscious of ourselves,

were aware of being strange creatures in a universe that doesn't explain itself, that doesn't offer an immediate manual of meaning. i think the human animal, therefore, hungers for meaning and purpose in an apparently meaningless and purposeless universe. so we're very divided, and religion has been, traditionally, classically, one of the ways in which the question has been answered, yes, there is a meaning, there is a purpose, and you can cooperate and give yourself to it. i'm no longer as comfortable with religion‘s certainties, but i'm certainly still addicted to the search, the strange human passion for finding meaning, beauty and joy. and that's the transcendental itch. this experience, going to that place at the age 01:14, cut you off from your family, though, didn't it? it did in a kind of emergent sense. it never cut me off from their love. but what i increasingly had was the past, because it started me on this long journey to education, to self reflection,

to intellectualising things, to thinking about things. i came from a culture that was embedded in hard work. it didn't, in a sense, educationally evolve. so, increasingly i did feel a bit of a stranger, but a loving stranger. you tell a very affecting tale in your book about writing a letter to your father, trying to win him back for god, and forjesus. i know, it was horrible. every year, on good friday, we fasted all day. we had a devotion called the three hours which were exactly corresponding with three hoursjesus had on the cross. they were always emotionally very intense. it was a visiting monk who preach to us. i was fired up by the desire to spread the word ofjesus and god. between the end of the three hours and when we have our tea, broke our fast, i wrote my father a pious letter, calling him back to god.

writing the book, i realised that as i was writing that, i'd been in three hours intense devotion, he was probably facing the next three hours of his shift in a terrible factory. and so i sent this pious appeal to him. he had the grace never to reflect to it. but i'm still ashamed. and you found the letter much later, didn't you? yes. in my mother's drawer, yes. religion gives you permission to perform these discourtesies. yes, deeply ashaming. you say that it all started to change for you when you hit puberty? yes, because sex hit me. i'd gone there as a wee prepubescent boy. i'd caught this monastic, romantic vocation, wanted to give myself away.

and part of that was celibacy. i discovered during an easter vacation, i used to work in a farm at kildavin, just outside balloch. i cuddled a land girl, and i had my first sexual experience. i didn't know what it was, just this thing surged through me. and the same thing happened that night. and i knew it was sinful, because christianity had this problem with sex from the beginning. not in a sense where we're saying this is a big thing that could ruin lives, get it right, be careful about it. the kind of christianity i inherited saw sex as intrinsically bad, and really good, godly people didn't do it. they were virgins, they were celibate. i was pulled in this terrible tension. and that was a secret i brought back to kelham, aged 16. looking at all these holy people, assuming they didn't have sexual thoughts, none of it was hitting them. it was only hitting me.

and when did you abandon celibacy, then? you're married, you have three daughters. when i got married, yes. but even that was a struggle, because i still felt this strange pull that marriage was second best, it was a concession. the prayer book wedding rite says that. it says marriage is a gift created by god as a gift for those that did not have the gift of continence. in other words, it was a method, 01’ a maintenance programme for people that couldn't give up the sex habit. so it always denigrated it. there was always the sense that you got a license to perform it, but god would rather you hadn't had to ask for it. was the question of sexuality the first step, in a sense, of you and the church parting company? i think the real kicker for me, i fought my way through and wrestled my way through this stuff intellectually. but emotionally and psychologically, you are always formed by this stuff. i think probably for me the real

kicker came quite late in my career in the ministry. it was the church's continued hatred of gay people, although many of them were, most of my early mentors as priests i realise now word gay men with this divided nature, giving themselves to god and the church, and a church that disapproved of them. the church would say, of course, it doesn't hate gay people, many parts of the church simply don't approve of gay sex. it's a distinction without a difference. if your very urges are condemned as unlawful and displeasing to god, and i've known many wonderful gay priests who live this kind of divided life. i asked one of them, i said, why do you stick with this? he said because ofjesus. he had a sense thatjesus would have understood because jesus was surrounded by these discarded outsiders. that's the bit of christianity that still appeals to me.

the group that feel that this man they got absolute acceptance of themselves in their own sense of rottenness. but christianity became respectable, became kind of bourgeois. but the people around jesus never were. for me, the people that carried that virus were the gay people, because they, themselves, felt themselves to be outsiders. it was when the church, which had a don't ask, don't tell policy for a long time, actively started persecuting gay people in the 90s, i think that's when i saw that certain ways of holding faith were cruel. i think cruelty is the worst human rights and has to be challenged wherever it appears. i think that was the thing that really started me off on the journey that took me away. you say in your book that even at kelham hall, when you were still in training for a monastic life, it was an all—male environment. your first real crush, you say, was with a fellow novice, another trainee priest, a young man. what was that relationship like?

it was unnerving, in many ways. i was quite a happy student, worked hard. and then i fell in love with a fellow novice, and plunged me into regret, because i didn't want to be with anyone but him. i didn't fantasise sexually about him, but emotionally i want to be near him all the time. i didn't really know what he thought of me. i thought he was kind of fond of me. i met him 30 years later, on my retreat to come and be a bishop. we'd have a holiday in cornwall together. we had to sleep in a double bed in a farmhouse in cornwall. i was intrigued by the fact that i was in bed when he came back after having brushed his teeth, and he said, i'll sleep on the top side of the sheet, to separate us. and i wondered about that, he must have had a wee inkling. when i went to make my retreat at this nunnery, in 1986, before coming back to edinburgh as bishop, they said to me,

you'll know someone who is here. he's come back from africa. he is leaving the order, but he's our chaplain at the moment. and it was this guy. i made my confession to him. and then leaving, the last day, i referred to thatjourney because i remembered the rosebay willowherb blossoming on the roadsides. he said, we were in love. i said, yes. i said, can i do anything for you? he said, buy me a wee transistor radio. and i did. you've been a champion of gay people, the right of gay people to join the priesthood. why? why does that matter to you so much? partly because, to me, it's a straightforward justice issue. i think the most important christian doctrine is the doctrine of the incarnation, which is presupposed in god's love of the world, of nature and all its complexity

and plurality. and being gay is part of that. even though i'm not sure about god now, i'm sure that cruelty to individuals who cannot help their colour, their sexuality, their gender, is the thing we most passionately must oppose in politics and religion. and where i saw the church being increasingly cruel to them, and it peaked for me at the lambeth conference conference of 1998. so, just to put this in context, you are now bishop of edinburgh, you are the most senior anglican clergyman in scotland, and you went to this, these conferences happen once a decade. and you sort to describe as cruelty among your fellow clergymen. what do you mean? there was a debate on human sexuality, essentially about gay sexuality, and whether practising gay people could be ordained. they had been in their

thousands for centuries. the african bishops, who were particularly homophobic, hijacked the debate. they wanted the lambeth conference to condemn gay sexuality in a famous proposal called 101. it was like being at a nuremberg rally. it wasn't a considered debate, the bible says we can't support this, i want to be compassionate. no, it was ugly, it was cruel. they were saying the kind of things that the most horrible bigots say. i came out of it drained. something died in me. 0utside, on a wee grassy knoll outside the tent where we've had the debate, a nigerian bishop was exorcising a young gay man, called richard kirker, trying to cast out the devil of homosexuality. a devil did come out, but it was the devil of homophobia. it has bedevilled the anglican church ever since. we're still wrestling it. secular society has moved on. anyone under 35just doesn't get it.

but we're still rabbiting on about it. and it killed something in me. it's said that you threw your bishop's mitre in the thames, is it true? yes, it's true. did get an artist to make me a biodegradable mitre, because i didn't want to pollute the thames river. but, yeah, i chucked it in the thames. you stayed in the church for two more years? what is it like to stand by the alter preaching to people who believe in the resurrection, who believe in the divinity of christ, when you had long since given all that up? that was a slow, evolutionary process. it was more the ethical thing that did me. you can deal with doctrinal stuff — it is metaphoric. not to every priest, not to every believer, but to a lot of people. but the literal truth of the resurrection is non—negotiable for most christians. i suppose. but it has always been interpreted in a number of different ways. it seems to me that the resurrection

is about more than a resuscitated body walking out of a tomb — what's the significance of that? but the kind of resurrection that made the woman go to the front of the bus instead of the back, and made martin luther king challenge racism — that is real resurrection stuff. i'm not interested in the biology of bodies walking out of tombs. i'm interested in history. a lot of people mysticise these great events. religion is a story. it is not factual scientific knowledge. it is a fundamental category error to misunderstand that. but we have falsely sciencised a lot of things, scared theologians. if it helps you get through life believing those physical things, i wouldn't try to knock that for you, but don't force me to say that they are factual when i treat them as metaphorical and poetic. that makes them even more powerful. can you understand why a lot

of people in the anglican communion, a lot of christians who you lead, feel betrayed by the way in which you have changed your thinking about religion? sure. i hate hurting people. i did hurt a lot of people. i said that in my final sermon, isaid i had become, in my 60s, the kind of bishop i hated in my 30s. i had to be true to that. it was a slow, emergent process. i get that. i get the complexity of all of this. i hurt lots of people to whom i was a precious source of support. that's why i had to go away and take a sabbatical from religion. that's the trouble with religion, it got stuck 2,000—3,000 years ago. it got stuck with women. it got stuck with gay people. it got stuck with ways of understanding the astronomy of the universe. you can keep the best of religion and still intellectually stay true, and that is all that i was arguing for. i wasn't saying that you mustn't

believe in a physical resurrection or a six—day creation. if it helps you through life, then do it — as long it doesn't make you cruel. that's not the way i understand these things. but people told me how much i hurt them. i got a big mailbag. there was a kind of helplessness about it. in many ways, i was a divided soul. it is a classic scottish thing to be, it is what mcdermott referred to as the ‘antisyzygy‘ — that you can incorporate two contending realities in your own soul. i think that's not a bad way to live, because truth is really simple. should the church be forced by law to marry gay people, even when it doesn't want to? no, i wouldn't do that. i don't like the way the french do this. i like a secular society. if people want to cover themselves in head—to—foot cassock cloak, i don't want to interfere with that.

i quite like the accommodation we have reached in britain where we are pretty much a secular society. but history is untidy — there's elements of the old religious domination. i think the religious should be free to practise their beliefs and rituals in the sanctuary. i don't like when they try to bully people saying "because we forbid this, we're not going to let you get away with this in the public square." they get opt—outs. they discriminate against women, they discriminate against gays. let them be their eccentric, bigoted selves in the sanctuary but stand defiantly against them if they try to persuade secular society not to answer these imprisoned people. successive archbishops of canterbury have always prioritised preserving the unity of the worldwide anglican communion and admitting gay priests would have shattered that communion. were they right to hold onto that

until the church is ready to take that step together? there's an argument for that, clearly. it is this duality thing again. if your primary value is institutional unity, if you prize unity above said justice, you will do that. and honourable men and horrible men have done that. i can respect that. but if that's all you have, if you just have institutional unity, if you don't have maverick people saying "you shouldn't be doing that — you shouldn't be penalising gay people and women," that's called the prophetic tradition in christianity. there are three classic rules in hebrew religion — profit, priest, and king. king's rule, priestsjustify the rule with god anointing, it is always the prophets, the awkward squad, who come along and say "that's wrong."

if you purge the prophetic element of the church, you purge its cleansing element. it's probably not a good idea to make prophets, archbishops or even bishops, which is probably... i was a mis—description. i ended up feeling i had to prophetically challenge these injustices. but in my understanding of the ecology of institutions, i know it takes a while, but it's always the awkward sods, the minority, that bring change. because big, powerful institutions never volunteer to do this. male patriarchy in britain didn't volunteer to give women the vote — women died to get the vote. they chained themselves to railings and that is what brings change. ok, i can understand it, but morally, i'm sorry, i still think justice trumps institutional unity. you haven't walked away from the church altogether — you still sometimes attend your old church in edinburgh. it is a pretty forgiving church that welcomes

you back, isn't it? 0n the whole, the anglican church has been forgiving. it has been a messy and muddled church. it got hardened in the ‘90s when it was drifting and they thought the only way it could survive was to become very conservative and give people a perfect package answer to every question, but on the whole, the anglican church attended the question of every answer. it's still a spacious, imaginative church. i'm in church most sundays at old saint paul's. i love that building. it looks at the mystery of transcendence for me. it's uncomfortable. i don't do god comfortably. i would rather be in than out. do you still think of yourself as a christian? i am an agnostic christian, but i'm not interested in the labels. jesus is still very important to me. i never lostjesus. jesus was a challenger — he didn't prioritise institutional unity overjustice and truth. 0n the whole, people that prioritise

institutional integrity overjustice and truth don't get crucified. i'm interested that you still go back to kelham hall where it all started for you. is there a part of you that imagines the more monastic life you might have led? co nsta ntly, yea h. it's hard to talk about it without tearing up. i get weepy. i go back to the graveyard, that's all that's left of the order because they moved out in 1973. a bit of me still hankers after the absolutely tightly—packed, given—away life without this kind of questioning of this other self. what mcdermott calls the ‘caledonian antisyzygy‘ is in me. i am there, i am part of that, but i'm also part of someone who leaves places and moves on and is never comfortable. and abandons all certainties, that's been the story of your life? yeah, but that is painful — certainties can be painful. i'm now very suspicious

of certainty, both political and theological certainty. there is a cleansing humility about doubt. it helps us get our way through some of the jails we imprison ourselves in. yeah, i suppose i now preach the gospel of uncertainty. now, what about one of the great uncertainties — a life after death? i don't have that. i am probably more certain about not having it, but i can't say for certain. obviously, this universe is an extraordinary thing. there are my grandchildren over there, my dna will go on in them and their grandchildren. but i don't expect when i die to wake up and meet audrey hepburn guiding me into the afterlife, and all the prospectuses i've read of it doesn't attract me. but who knows, i might be surprised — not unpleasantly,

i hope. richard holloway, thank you for speaking to hardtalk my pleasure. hello there. the weekend's weather brought us plenty of warm sunshine. there was a bit of rain across northern and western parts of the country. but, as we head through much of the coming week, things are about to change. here is a scene sent in from sunday afternoon, southend—on—sea, in essex. now, through the course of this coming week, the weather is much more changeable. there'll be some rain for many of us, at times, and things won't be quite as warm. so cooler conditions particularly overnight, you'll be pleased to hear, if you found it fairly uncomfortable for sleeping in recent nights.

now, during monday, we have that low pressure and frontal systems not far away from the uk, bringing some showery rain to many parts of the country. through the day on monday, one frontal system brings a bit of rain to the east of scotland, north—east of england, as well. that should ease away through the day, and then for all of us it is a day of sunny spells and scattered showers, and across eastern england, in particular, some of the showers heavy and thundery, bringing a lot of heavy rain, and some hail and thunder as well. northern ireland, though, having a dryer day, with some sunshine into the west of scotland. eastern scotland staying fairly cloudy and damp. then as we head our way south across england and wales, some heavy showers, especially towards the east. could catch one or two heavy showers almost anywhere across england and wales. the south—west probably having a dryer interlude, and the south—east still some torrential downpours bringing some sub—surface—water flooding. now, there is the chance that the showers could stay away from wimbledon. so a largely dry day, but there is the chance that we could see some showers interrupting play, i think, during the afternoon.

then, heading through into the evening hours, those heavy showers in the east eventually start to ease away. thunderstorms dying down overnight, but then we'll see the next batch of rain moving in from the west. we could see 26 degrees in the south—east. tuesday, then, starts off not quite as high and mighty as recent nights, but still 15 or 16 degrees across the south—east. and then, as we move through the day, this showery rain from central parts of england and wales moves eastwards. still some dryer weather, though, for the north—west of scotland, into northern ireland, too. more persistent rain works into the south—west of england later on in the afternoon. of the time of year. —— temperatures 15 to 21 degrees, reasonably typical of the time of year. fresher than it has been. through into wednesday, then, that rain works its way eastwards. so some rain, some welcome rain, for a time in the south—east. that should clear away, and then actually many of us having a dryer day with a light breeze.

certainly fresher than it has been for the time of year. moderate rain on wednesday, with a light breeze, and temperatures around 15 to 22 degrees. taking you through towards the end of the week, we will see some rain in the north—west, and temperatures continue to be not as hot as they have been. bye for now. this is bbc news. i'm tim willcox. our top stories: as iraq's prime minister declares mosul free from so—called islamic state, the un launches a humanitarian appeal to help the devastated city's residents. president trump backtracks on proposals to set up a joint cyber security unit with russia — following ridicule from within the republican party. what could brexit mean for food prices, and consumer choice? we talk to industry insiders. and i'm ben bland. us secretary of state rex tillerson is in turkey to attend a major oil conference.

so what lies ahead for the black stuff? and women in india are fighting a taxing battle when it comes to personal hygiene products.