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.
Sin cannot tear you away from him [Christ] even though you commit adultery a hundred times a day and commit as many murders.
It is not surprising that liberals believed in progress. The idea of progress justified the entire transition from feudalism to capitalism. It legitimated the breaking of the remaining opposition to the commodification of everything, and it tended to wipe away all the negatives of capitalism on the grounds that the benefits outweighed, by far, the harm.
The atheist does not say 'there is no God,' but he says 'I know not what you mean by God; I am without idea of God'; the word 'God' is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation. ... The Bible God I deny; the Christian God I disbelieve in; but I am not rash enough to say there is no God as long as you tell me you are unprepared to define God to me.
America rests on shared values rather than shared ethnicity.
The solemn pledge to abstain from telling the truth was called socialist realism.
We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.
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