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.
Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.
Either an ordered Universe or a medley heaped together mechanically but still an order; or can order subsist in you and disorder in the Whole! And that, too, when all things are so distinguished and yet intermingled and sympathetic.
Every religious tradition is rooted in mysteries I don't pretend to understand, including claims about what happens after we die. But this I know for sure: as long as we're alive, choosing resurrection is always worth the risk.
Where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed by inserting "Jesus Christ," so that it would read "A departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion;" the insertion was rejected by the great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination.
How can we live in harmony? First we need to know we are all madly in love with the same God.
Americans have a severe disease - worse than AIDS. It's called the winner's complex.
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