The writers of the French enlightenment had deliberately used blasphemy as a weapon, refusing to accept the power of the Church to set limiting points on thought.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the use of provocative ideas as a means to challenge established authority in thought and belief.
Salman Rushdie's quote reflects the actions of Enlightenment thinkers who utilized blasphemy to confront the Church's influence over intellectual discourse. By rejecting the Church's authority to dictate the boundaries of thought, these writers sought to expand the realm of ideas, promote freedom of expression, and encourage critical thinking.
In practice
In a discussion about freedom of expression, one might reference this quote to emphasize the role of provocative thought in shaping society.
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.
Speaking psycho-analytically, it may be laid down that any "great ideal" which people mention with awe is really an excuse for inflicting pain on their enemies. Good wine needs no bush, and good morals need no bated breath.
Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.
...that melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
He that hath lost his credit is dead to the world.
As we go through life we gradually discover who we are, but the more we discover, the more we lose ourselves.
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