Yeah, because in context he was talking about LIBERAL Episcopalians, Presbyterians & Mehodists- he had no real argument against conservative Episcopalians, Presbyterians & Methodists.
To many conservative C’tians, denial of JCs unique & supreme Sonship, His Virgin Birth & Bodily Resurrection, & approval of sex outside of straight marriage are all
symptoms of an “Antichrist” attitude/spirit. Robertson has more agreement with
conservative Catholic & Orthodox than with liberal Protties.
Granted- he ciould have actually explained all that rather than saying stupid stuff that I then have to explain.
JThunder, he did indeed say it but I do agree that ReligiousTolerance.org is not a source of balanced objective info.
I saw Salman Rushdie speak at a banquet in early 2003 at a hotel in downtown D.C. I don’t think anyone checked bags at the door, and in any case I brought in a bag of his books. There was no one visible protecting him. After the banquet, I was wondering, as I walked up to the head table to get his signature on the books, if there were snipers protecting him hiding in the balcony around the banquet hall. I began to imagine the conversation between these imaged guards on seeing me walk toward Rushdie: “What’s that little red-haired guy doing walking toward Rushdie with that bag in his hand? What’s he pulling out of the bag? Let’s shoot him now before he get any closer to Rushdie just in case.” Rushdie politely signed the books for me. Incidentally, he lives part of the year in New York and part of the year in London, according to a recent article.
BTW, has anybody posting in this thread actually read The Satanic Verses? Because I haven’t, and I’ve never heard anything about the book that would make me want to.
Yep, not his best book. Midnight’s Children is much much better. And he writes essays very well. I think of him as being a lot like Umberto Eco as a writer. Difficult to get through, rewarding if you take the bother. Some authors “build character” like my dad claimed shoveling the walk does. Rushdie is one of those. (Brown is not).
I read it a very long time ago, but unlike the Da Vinci Code, where what is regarded as heresy by many is a very central theme to the book, I remember the Satanic Verses as having its heresy be far less central and obvious. Dan Brown pretty much comes right out with “hey, lookie here, I’m saying things the Church won’t like.” Then again, I was raised Catholic, so understanding Islamic heresy isn’t nearly as easy for me.
As to the books popularity, Rushdie has always been a literary, well respected author. He had just won a Booker, which made him higher profile than some more obscure respected authors, and his name is often talked about when probable Nobel Prizes in Literature are mentioned. But he’ll never be a best seller. He sits in a strange place in terms of World literature, an Indian who was born into a secular Islamic family (as opposed to a member of the Hindu majority), he was primarily educated in England. This gave his voice some weight on Indian Hindu/Islamic relations, and I suspect the fatwa had as much to do with heresy as with politics - Rushdie’s secular moderation isn’t really what the extremist want to hear - and he is one of the few voices who was heard at the time outside the culture (keep in mind, we are talking late 80s, the world has changed a lot since then).
I’m sorry, I see no distinguishable difference between what he put in his book and what he was quoted on his website.
“All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate”
vs
"the artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals depicted in this novel all exist "
(I personally doubt that any of the “secret rituals” are really secret and that he is hyping stuff that is private, not secret, but I will give him a pass on that.)
We are still talking artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals with no mention of historical events. It would be intersting to see an actual claim by Brown that he actually believes that Jesus married (Mary Magdalene or anyone else) and that the descendants of Jesus are still running around Europe. It would even be interesting to find evidence that Brown believes that, even if it did not happen, the RCC believes that it did and that they are covering some vast conspiracy.
What we generally get are these coy statements intended to promote book sales.
Speaking of Eco, Brown has far more in common with Eco, who has heresy against the Catholic Church in both Name of the Rose and Foucoult’s Pendulum - as a I recall. Been a long time there as well, but Foucoult’s Pendulum is very Da Vinci Code-ish, and both are hermeneutic novels - knights templar and secret societies and murder. However, the plot is so darn convoluted that its possible no one understood the darn thing, so its possible Eco has only managed to avoid assination by irate Catholics through his literary denseness.
In the spirit of, as you say, keeping an open mind, do you think it is possible that that the comparison you drew is simply ridiculous? Seriously. This is not a forum known for the throngs blindly coming to the defense of religion, yet the only person who agreed that there was a comparison (corectly) was lissener: both first names end in “an”.
I have. It’s all right. The heresy thing is blown way out of proportion. The book’s about an actor, Muslim by heritage, who’s in the process of an extended mental breakdown, and is having vivid hallucinations that he’s the prophet Mohammed. How literally one is to take these halluncinations is never made entirely clear. It’s possible to take this character’s delusions as a commentary on the religious experiences of the original Mohammed, but again, this is not at all explicit in the book, and is largely up to the interpretation of the reader.
I wouldn’t recommend The Satanic Verses to someone who hasn’t read anything else by Rushdie. Midnight’s Children or The Ground Beneath her Feet are much better, more accesible novels.
Sorry, that should have been “…is having vivid hallucinations that he’s the angel Gabriel, who (as I understand it) revealed the Koran to the prophet Mohammed.”
Dan Brown writes a novel about how the Catholic Church has secret death squads that assassinate anyone who dares to tell the suppressed true story of Jesus’s life.
So therefore, Quasimodem is concerned, because Dan Brown has wrote a story about the suppressed true life of Jesus, and therefore could be under threat from those Catholic death squads.
Except the death squads are fictional, not real. There are no death squads who assassinate heretics, and haven’t been any since the Middle Ages. Heck, if they were going to assassinate heretics, wouldn’t just about every Protestant church member be a heretic? And if the Catholic church was planning on killing anyone who dared reveal the secret history, haven’t they done a piss-poor job? The time to assassinate Dan Brown is BEFORE he publishes his book, not after.
So Dan Brown is not in danger from Catholic death squads, despite the fact that his novel has people who are in danger from Catholic death squads, because those Catholic death squads were what we scientists call “fictional”. Fictional death squads are unlikely to kill anyone. It’s like asking if James Cameron should be worried about robot assassins from the future. Or if Oliver Stone should be worried about assassins sent by the military-industrial complex that had Kennedy whacked. So no, Dan Brown doesn’t have to be worried about the fictional death squads he wrote about in his fictional novel.
I think there’s a world of difference between the two! For example, nobody denies that The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci exists. However, in his book, Dan Brown goes far beyond that. He inaccurately describes it as a painting of Jesus Christ sitting beside Mary Magdalene, with the Apostles in attendance.
He says that the Dead Sea Scrolls exist – and indeed, they do. However, he inaccurately claims that they contained many alternate gospels about the life of Christ, apart from those in the New Testament. This is simply false. The Dead Sea Scrolls do exist, but his description of these documents is simply inaccurate.
And so forth, and so on. The artwork, architecture, documents and rituals that Dan Brown mentioned may indeed exist, but his descriptions are inaccurate in the extreme.
OK. Let me rephrase that:
I see no distinguishable difference between what he claimed for the book in his preface and what he claimed for his book in the web “interview.”
In each case, he makes the claim that there are real objects and rituals. In each case, he notes that the book is a work of fiction. In neither case does he make a claim that the events in the book are historical or accurate. His claim (in the preface and the web interview) is only that he employed actual artifacts and rituals as props in his book. Yes, in the text of the book (which he admits is fiction) he employs those artifacts and rituals in wildly stupid ways. When discussing his fiction, he then coyly avoids directly admitting that his descriptions are fictive, however, in neither his preface nor his interview does he actually state that he has not manipulated his descriptions for his own purposes.
But I’m not talking about the events. I’m talking about (to use Brown’s own words) the " artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals." In that respect, the disclaimer on his website clearly does NOT match up with what he stated in the book.
(Moreover, I think that some of his descriptions of documents would have to encompass their corollary events as well – such as his allegation that Constantine compiled the New Testament, or that the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in the 1950s. Even if we ignore this distinction though, Dan Brown’s claim remains grossly inaccurate.)
I must disagree with that. The preface of his book (which is labelled “FACT” in large, bold letters) clearly affirms that his descriptions of all these documents, etc. are accurate. By labelling his descriptions as accurate, he is affirming that he did not manipulate them in any way, shape or form.
