Salman Rushdie has an article in TheStar.com: Just give me that old-time atheism! (via Arts & Letters.) I’ve not read any of his books, so I was interested in seeing what he had to say. Unfortunately, he has just as simplistic and limited a world-view as that which he is skewering:
It is among the truths believed to be self-evident by the followers of all religions that godlessness is equivalent to amorality and that ethics requires the underpinning presence of some sort of ultimate arbiter, some sort of supernatural absolute, without which secularism, humanism, relativism, hedonism, liberalism and all manner of permissive improprieties will inevitably seduce the unbeliever down immoral ways.
All religions, you say? Harumph.
I ended up suspecting Rushdie of being one of those writers who believes that being uniformly critical (without offering any solution, suggestion, or resolution), if done with great style, makes for successful writing.