Salman Rushdie is a Wise Man
The human divide isn't between the religious and the irreligious but between the arrogantly cocksure and the humbly unsure
Salman Rushdie is a great man.
I met him twice. Once I had fun with the fact that I ran into Rushdie in the tiny town of [redacted], NV in a small grocery store at 11pm, and the second time we had an extremely meaningful public conversation on Yom Kippur in Manhattan about bravery.
I made a video in his honor about the Bar Kochba era Rabbi Akiva for my friend Ty over a year ago.
On an unrelated note but for those interested in understanding better what the Talmud is, here is my video on the opening paragraph of that grand corpus of religious literature where I first read and translate that paragraph quickly to demonstrate its opaqueness to all but the initiated and then spend the rest of the video initiating you.
Back to Salman Rushdie.
Salman has a new book out called “Knife” about the attack on his life and its aftermath so he's making the television rounds during which he mentions that his survival seems miraculous (despite his disbelief in miracles) and that he had a premonitory dream about the upcoming attack (despite his disbelief in premonitory dreams).
Here's his 60 Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper Vanderbilt.
In the comments there somebody asks
And in reaponse to some disrespectful responses he admirably doesn't surrender to either silence or hatred but asks again:
I appreciated his tone so I took the time to respond to him. I don't know his level of English so I kept mine quite basic without sacrificing any primary points.
I hope you like it too.
It's a fair question Metarig but the answer is fairly obvious.
A. I'm sure he had many many such dreams over the years that scared him and that some of them scared him enough that he did not actually go to the planned event or at least demanded security. And
B. We all want to believe that there are untapped resources of important information yet to discover (in fact there likely are), so we are all quite willing to consider them when they are offered to us.
The fact that the only dreams we remember are those which ended up getting it right is so obvious that doesn't deserve it's own designated letter in this list.
Finally, there is the matter of what I call "religious conviction".
Religious Conviction is a claimed certitude for something nobody can actually really be CERTAIN about. Mohammed's night journey is a good example from the right, the innately equal average mathematical aptitude of different racial demographics is a good example from the left. Anyone who claims to be certain about these things has a "religious convection".
The fact that Rushdie (whose father named the family after the famous Muslim rationalist and skeptic Ibn Rushd) is open to the possibility that he is wrong about premonitions and probably pretty much everything else is a praiseworthy example of his lack of such religious conviction.
The great divide between fools and the wise they are rate or wrong about, but whether they are closed-minded or open-minded people.
Salman is so open minded that he freely shares his own internal doubts about his own convictions.
I'm sure that if he received evidence of el-Buraq he would share it too. THAT'S a wise and great man.
And just for fun, here's my new playlist of Overachieving YouTube Shorts.
These are my 17 YouTube Shorts, between 8 and 59 seconds each, which had the highest ratio of 👍 to Views. Being as many of them were denigrated by the algorithm despite their obvious popularity I figured they must be worth watching. I hope you enjoy and share them.
Yedidya
Highest 👍 Ratio: