> I agree that suggestions here that the Muslims were right in wanting to kill Rushdie were outrageous and wrong. However, unless he's clairvoyant, he wasn't referring to those suggestions in his speech.
What, you think these woudl be the first time such views have been expressed about him? He's been anti-superstition, and publicly so, for a long, long time.
> he felt the need to broadly attack religion in general
And why not? If somethign is silly, it's silly... even if one specific aspect of it is *extremely* silly.
> I have no doubt, though, that Rushdie would make it illegal for Christians to hold office or vote if he had the power to do so.
Based on what?
####Based on what?#####
His own statements about driving superstition into the cupboard where it belongs. You can combine that with the behavior of societies that are further down the road toward secularism than we are (Europe & Canada), as well as the behavior of the secularist Democrats in the Senate.
Secularism of the Rushdie variety tends to create some pretty goofy and dysfunctional societies. Chesterton was right when he said people who stop believing in God don't believe in nothing...they believe in anything. This idea that secularists are particularly tolerant (they aren't) or uniquely rational (they most certainly aren't) is one of the most nonsensical fairy tales of our era.
I recall reading an article a few years ago on a referendum in Ireland on abortion. The pro-life side won. The writer of the article (pro-abortion, as are most journalists) blamed the pro-life victory on rural voters, whom he described as being under the influence of the Catholic Church. He noted that some precincts in the city of Dublin voted pro-abortion, since the "educated" city voters were less under church influence.
Of course, it never occurred to the journalist that those city voters were being influenced by something else. His attitude was that they were rational, free-thinking, independent minds who just coincidentally all came to the same conclusion that abortion should be legal. Of course that's nonsense. They were influenced by the liberal media, the liberal academic community, and even fashion magazines to vote the way they did.
Secularists aren't free thinkers, they're just influenced by things other than Christianity. This is why they usually end up all coming to the same conclusion. Anyone can easily see the herding or hiving behavior that Lawrence Auster has described as occurring among the secularist forces. It's the source of Political Correctness and some of the more preposterous views expounded today, particularly in more secularized parts of the world:
Gender doesn't exist, it's a sociological construction.
Homosexuality is just as normal as heterosexuality.
A new human life begins at birth, not conception.
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Only a secularized society would be "rational" enough to believe such ludicrous, and even unscientific, bilge.
Europe was once the heart of Christendom. As long as it was that, it could hold back Islam. But how can a secularized Europe do so? Secularism creates dysfunctional societies where living for the moment becomes paramount. The order of the day becomes reordering society to make it more "equal", less "unfair". Fighting "sexism" and "homophobia" becomes more important than bigoted concerns like guarding the border or preserving the culture. New taboos (tradition, homophobia, heterosexism), new superstitions (equality, atheism), and new priests (media figures, academic figures, political figures) replace the old. Only unlike the old, they aren't tested by time. They have no track record of success. One of the reasons liberal secularists call themselves "progressive" is because they've never succeeded in creating a single civilization. They hijack others and declare the values that created the civilization in the first place to be archaic and superstitious.
So with European Christianity dead, who can stand against Islam? Without a strong and functional Christianity, Europe has two options: Become Islamic or suppress all religion as the old Soviet Union once did.
In truth, secularism is just another faith. Instead of faith that there's something beyond man, it's faith that there's nothing beyond man. Chesterton was right.