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.
We have this long history of racism in this country, and as it happens, the criminal justice system has been perhaps the most prominent instrument for administering racism. But the racism doesn't actually come from the criminal justice system.
Until the men of action clear out the talkers we who have social consciences are at the mercy of those who have none.
It was his subconscious which told him this - that infuriating part of a person's brain which never responds to interrogation, merely gives little meaningful nudges and then sits humming quietly to itself, saying nothing.
A lot of the stuff about white-supremacist groups was very family-friendly: 'We just love our people.' One the surface, you go, 'Gee, what's wrong with loving your people?' But when you love your people to the exclusion of everything else that's remotely different, that's when you get into trouble.
Speak the truth do not become angered and give when asked, even be it a little. By these three conditions one goes to the presence of the gods.
When you make your peace with authority, you become authority.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.