pz

There is a marvelous discussion of Rushdie on
<a href="http://www.salon.com/" target="_blank">Salon</a>, titled <a href="http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2002/10/01/rushdie/index.html" target="_blank">A Beacon of Sanity</a>. Check it out.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from the end of the article that are particularly relevant here:

'Rushdie the cosmopolitan is a defender of an idea even less fashionable, at the moment, than moral relativism -- secular humanism. It's a cause some of our best thinkers, such as Hitchens and Martin Amis, are increasingly taking up. Though hardly politically expedient, the fight against religion's tyranny makes intellectual and emotional sense right now. It could even replace the struggle against first-world imperialism as the organizing principle of radical thought, encompassing as it does the fight against the lunatics of al-Qaida, the butchers in Gujarat, the hard-line settlers in the West Bank, the rapists in the Catholic Church, the bombers of abortion clinics and, of course, our own attorney general.'

'Amis said it best in a June essay for the Guardian: "Since it is no longer permissible to disparage any single faith or creed, let us start disparaging all of them. To be clear: an ideology is a belief system with an inadequate basis in reality; a religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful." Rushdie echoes this sentiment -- as he writes in an enraged reaction to the killings in Gujarat, "[I]n India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood ... What happened in India, happened in God's name. The problem's name is God."'

'But elsewhere Rushdie goes beyond mere denunciation, turning atheism into a celebration rather than a rejection. In a delightful 1997 letter to the newly born 6 billionth person in the world, he encourages us to join Voltaire's battle, "the revolution in which each of us could play our small, six-billionth part: once and for all we could refuse to allow priests, and the fictions on whose behalf they claim to speak, to be the policemen of our liberties and behavior." He ends hopefully, "Imagine there's no heaven, my dear Six Billionth, and at once the sky's the limit."'

Toto

Perhaps Rushdie's new book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679463348/internetinfidelsA" target="_blank">Step Across This Line</a>, will be an II book of the month.

NFLP

Don't miss Rushdie's book on Buddha. It's called "Hey Fatso".

galiel

pz, thanks for turning us on to that article in Salon. It is very encouraging.

Oresta

PZ,
Thanks for the link. Rushdie is among my favorite post-colonial writers.

I'm not sure I would put Rushdie in the same category of iconoclasts such as Hitchens. The fuel that drives Hitchens' engine seems to be rage tinged with hatred. Rushdie's works are lush celebrations of those forces - love, music, art, etc. - expressed as antidotes to the worst elements of human culture, religion and zenophobia being not the least of these.

&lt;At the edge of this topic.&gt; The "Beacon of Sanity" review contrasts Rushdie to Christopher Hitchins, who, you may know, recently left The Nation after 20 years, because of the magazine's position on Iraq. The "hard" left claims Hitchens is morphing into a conservative. Here's Richard Harth's screed on H. in Counter Punch.
Edited to add the link.
<a href="http://counterpunch.org/harth1001.html" target="_blank">http://counterpunch.org/harth1001.html</a>

[ October 05, 2002: Message edited by: Oresta ]</p>

Sabine Grant

What is wrong with " fatsos" NFLP ? I hope for your sake that you are slim and beyong reproach. Is not that ironical a devout christian defending good ole buddah ? hey...... I am not even a fatso anylonger but I was once. It kind of humbles you somehow.