This jumped out while watching the video:

BILL MOYERS: From my notebook of Rushdie wisdom, quote, “Human beings understand themselves and shape their futures by arguing and challenging and questioning and saying the un-sayable, not by bowing the knee whether to gods or to men.” Isn’t that exactly what religious extremists do not want to hear?

SALMAN RUSHDIE: Yes, of course it is. Because it seems to me that what I’m trying to say is that the purpose of–you could even say grandly the purpose of life. A purpose of our lives is to broaden what we can understand and say and therefore be. You know, it’s to become, it enriches us as people to push outwards against the frontiers of knowledge and, if you like, of acceptable ideas. And there are of course people who don’t think like that. And who want to do the opposite really, want to push those boundaries in.

BILL MOYERS: When you say that we shouldn’t bow our knee to any man or god you’re going to fly right in the face of their sense of reality.

SALMAN RUSHDIE: Yes. I mean I’m aware of that. But I’m not interested in their sense of reality. I’m trying to say that, that is an extremely reprehensible way to look at the world.
—-from the transcript of the June 23rd show

Definitely a “secular humanist” here (a real one). The supreme “purpose” here seems to be “having a broad perspective”. While I might pride myself in having one, it is no less an idolatry to elevate “discourse” to such an absolute than is any other idolatry. (And judging by the way our present political discourse is looking in America, it seems that “positions” and “stances” trump what I would think would be the purpose of the Church: to discern how God’s people can be odedient, and in that, indepedent from the culture’s ultimate values which fly in the face of Kingdom values.