From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that humans often misuse the concept of God to rationalize immoral actions.
Salman Rushdie's quote highlights the tendency of individuals and societies throughout history to invoke divine authority in order to excuse or legitimize actions that are fundamentally unjust. This reflection points to a deeper examination of morality, faith, and the influence of religion on human behavior, encouraging a critical view of how faith can be manipulated in the name of justifying wrongful deeds.
In practice
During a debate on moral philosophy, this quote can be used to illustrate the misuse of religion.
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 Soviet government is the most realistic regime in the world - no ideals.
I do ask myself why I make people so enraged, because I only ever say what I think. And while I know it might not be everyone's point of view, that doesn't seem particularly intolerable to me.
Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.
Freeman denied the claim that he was a βman of Godβ, saying that βthe question of faith is whatever you actually believe is. We take a lot of what we're talking about in science on faith; we posit a theory, and until it's dis-proven we have faith that it's true. If the mathematics work out, then it's true, until it's proven to be untrue.
Any relationship between a building and its users is one of violence, for any use means the intrusion of a human body into a given space, the intrusion of one order into another.
To know the history of science is to recognize the mortality of any claim to universal truth.
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