Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.
Interpretation
The quote suggests a disconnection between people's beliefs and their true spiritual integrity.
Salman Rushdie highlights a troubling paradox where individuals profess belief in God while grappling with their inner 'demons,' which likely refers to personal struggles, moral failings, or unexamined beliefs. This statement calls into question the authenticity of one's faith and the need for a more profound spiritual introspection in a world where many claim to be guided by their faith yet often fall short of its true values.
In practice
A speaker at a spiritual retreat discussing the struggles of maintaining authentic faith in a material world.
I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.
Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
faith without doubt is addiction
I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
The antiquity and general acceptance of an opinion is not assurance of its truth.
I hope that I will be the last victim in China's long record of treating words as crimes.
Self-respect is to the soul as oxygen is to the body. Deprive a person of oxygen, and you kill his body; deprive him of self-respect and you kill his spirit.
There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet.
The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, selfappointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.
We want freedom. We want freedom from the constraints of the cycles of the sun and the moon. We want freedom from drought and weather, freedom from the movement of game, the growth of plants, freedom from control from mendacious popes and kings, freedom from ideology, freedom from want. This idea of freeing ourselves has become the compass of the human journey.
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