It seems that the right of freedom of speech that was enshrined in numerous constitutions is now under attack by religious institutions.
Interpretation
The quote addresses the conflict between freedom of speech and religious institutions' influence on that right.
Salman Rushdie's quote highlights a critical issue in society where the fundamental right to free expression—protected by many constitutions—is being challenged by religious institutions. This tension raises important questions about the balance between respecting religious beliefs and upholding the freedom to speak one's mind, suggesting that such freedoms may be increasingly threatened in contemporary discourse.
In practice
During a debate about censorship and its impact on democracy.
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.
For a flicker of a moment I imagined a world completely different from the one I'd always known, a world in which I was treated with fairness, even kindness-- a world in which fathers didn't sell their daughters.
He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.
We humans are obsessed with lights...Perhaps it is our way of hurling the constellations back at the sky.
Sameness is the mother of disgust, variety the cure.
We are living in the era of premeditation and the perfect crime. Our criminals are no longer helpless children who could plead love as their excuse. On the contrary, they are adults and the have the perfect alibi: philosophy, which can be used for any purpose - even for transforming murderers into judges.
A coin is turned around before it is handed to the beggar, yet a child is unflinchingly tossed into cosmic bruteness.
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