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.
Remarkably, governments are beginning to embrace the idea that nothing enhances democracy more than giving voice and information to everybody in the country. Why not open their books if they have nothing to hide?
Though builders may build, in the main they follow the plans of architects. Teachers teach, but they must have a text. Politicians govern, but only upon the flow of commentary that raises them up or casts them down.
Democracy passes into despotism.
When machines fail, when technology fails, when the conventional religion fails, people have got to have something. Even a zombin lurching through the night can seem pretty cheerful compared to the existential comedy/horror of the ozone layer dissolving under the combined assult of a million flurocarbon spray cans of deoderant." - The Mist
I only wish that ordinary people had an unlimited capacity for doing harm; then they might have an unlimited power for doing good.
May I not come before You with empty hands, since we are rewarded according to our deeds.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.