[Topic Split] Ayn Rand is anti-religious

[DepricatedZero]

I looked her up on wikipedia and she sounds like a fascinating person.

If you do read any of her...work. Do keep in mind what I've said... Then it'll all make sense.

If "what I've said" refers to what you've said in the previous thread (http://www.leagueofreason.org.uk//viewtopic.php?f=7&t=9479&start=20) - which consists of:

Ayn Rand is the true face of Jesus in the US.

Perhaps its just me, but it would seem as though we have gotten off topic...

Nah, I think it highlights the subconscious mental processes of "bizzaro" christians.

Ayn Rand made an atheist of me.

Well that's the irony for US Christian conservatives, isn't it?

You could be correct. All I know is that Jesus, Marxism and the Constitution do not mix well.

Religion and state don't mix well...period. No matter what the form of governance.

Have you bothered to read any of her works? Cause to the statement "Ayn Rand is the true face of Jesus in the US," nothing could be farther from the truth.

Ayn Rand is the antithesis of Jesus and Christianity. She preached selfish individualism and renounced altruism as such. In Galt's speech (the famous 90 some page tirade in Atlas Shrugged) she wrote that Christianity holds the purpose of man's life "is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question."

The full text of the speech has been posted around, here's the first hit I found on Google for it, if you're interested:
http://amberandchaos.com/?page_id=106

Ayn Rand stated in numerous interviews that religion is evil, though she acknowledged that some religions had specific good points, but that those good points were based on bad premises. She condemned Christianity pretty loudly as a religion focused on human sacrifice.

To say she's the "true face of Jesus in the US" is ludicrous, to a degree that I can't even fathom a bigger falsehood.

Now - there are a number of people who call her a Libertarian. She violently rejected that label. There are also a huge number of bible thumpers who claim to uphold her ideals. She would violently denounce them, and the ARI and Atlas Society have. Religious nuts might embrace her ideals, but she herself rejected those nuts. On libertarianism she had to say, "They are perhaps the worst political group today, because they can do the most harm to capitalism, by making it disreputable. "

Some interview questions and responses that reflect her view of libertarians are recorded here:
http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=education_campus_libertarians

If you truly haven't bothered reading her works before coming to your conclusions, and are just parroting what you've heard from others - here are a couple resources for you to learn for yourself. I don't identify as an Objectivist only because I don't agree with Peikoff on the immutability of it - my views are based on a realistic application of her ideals, though. That's a whole different topic though.

Galt's Speech(linked above, but here also: http://amberandchaos.com/?page_id=106 ) is one expression of her ideals. It's towards the end of Atlas Shrugged, so some of the context will be lost if you're not familiar with the story, but it works all the same.

Here's another useful resource, The Ayn Rand Lexicon.
http://aynrandlexicon.com/
This is a searchable lexicon that contains direct quotes and citations from Ayn Rand, and what she says about specific topics. Useful if you want to see what she thinks of, say, censorship.

Anyway, what actually bothered me about the statement was the apparent lack of awareness involved in it. I have no problem with people disrespecting Rand or having a low opinion of her. I do think it's appropriate to learn about what you're bashing, though.

 

[DepricatedZero]

Crap I'm a noob, this was supposed to go in the Religion & Irreligion Forum. Anyone mind moving it for me?

 

[Anachronous Rex]

Crap I'm a noob, this was supposed to go in the Religion & Irreligion Forum. Anyone mind moving it for me?

Done.

 

[tuxbox]

Ayn Rand is the true face of Jesus in the US.

DepricatedZero,

I took televator's post as a statement of irony. Considering a lot of christians love her due to some Tea Party supporters touting Rand as an American hero.

 

[DepricatedZero]

Ayn Rand is the true face of Jesus in the US.

DepricatedZero,

I took televator's post as a statement of irony. Considering a lot of christians love her due to some Tea Party supporters touting Rand as an American hero.

/facepalm

I'm a moran...

I had just come down off a 5 hour stint of doing homework, I was reaching for something different to think about...hah...

 

[The Felonius Pope]

No harm done. We all stupid stupid shit.

 

[televator]

What the...?! Who's a...?!

:lol:

As it has already been pointed out, it's the irony, Zero. Think...about...the irony.

 

[bluejatheist]

Ha Ha Ha

Good stuff >>

 

[DepricatedZero]

 

[theyounghistorian77]

Okays this may not be quite on the thread topic, but i wonder if its possible to ask DepricatedZero to provide one with a critique of this article from George Monbiot please

Thank you for whatever response in advance

 

[DepricatedZero]

The article offensively and aggressively misrepresents every aspect of her philosophy. Moreover, it's clear from the description given of Atlas Shrugged that Monbiot never actually read the book.

So to try and mirror your own style, TYH, I'll break it apart line for line, as best I can.

It has a fair claim to be the ugliest philosophy the postwar world has produced.

Egoism isn't "postwar" - Rand's philosophy is one of ethical egoism. Of course, with an opening line that myopic, we know where the rest of the article is going.

Selfishness, it contends, is good, altruism evil, empathy and compassion are irrational and destructive.

At least he got that right. I bet he means to highlight that as a problem though.

The poor deserve to die; the rich deserve unmediated power.

Nope. She has never in any way said anything even remotely similar to this, nor is that even a possible interpretation of her ethics.

It has already been tested, and has failed spectacularly and catastrophically.

Citation needed.

Yet the belief system constructed by Ayn Rand, who died 30 years ago today, has never been more popular or influential.

It's still not popular or influential. Bastardizations of it are.

Paragraph 2. . .

Rand was a Russian from a prosperous family who emigrated to the United States.

Rand's family was chased out of the country, fleeing communism. They were successful, in the middle-class style. Her father owned and operated a pharmacy. Just the one. But that was enough for the Bolsheviks to come after them.

Through her novels (such as Atlas Shrugged) and her nonfiction (such as The Virtue of Selfishness) she explained a philosophy she called Objectivism.

That's 2 true statements so far...

This holds that the only moral course is pure self-interest.

That's ethical egoism in a nutshell.

We owe nothing, she insists, to anyone, even to members of our own families.

And I agree. Heard of a "black sheep in the family?"

She described the poor and weak as "refuse" and "parasites", and excoriated anyone seeking to assist them.

And here we get in to the aggressive misinterpretation, misrepresentation, and outright lies. She never labeled the poor or weak as such. What she did is illustrate that there are those who will feign to be poor or weak in order to suckle at the teat of public welfare. People like this:
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/mar/07/nation/la-nn-na-lottery-winner-collects-welfare-20120307
People who would rather mooch off of others, than work for themselves.

Apart from the police, the courts and the armed forces, there should be no role for government: no social security, no public health or education, no public infrastructure or transport, no fire service, no regulations, no income tax.

Because the sole purpose of government is the defense of its land and its people.

Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, depicts a United States crippled by government intervention in which heroic millionaires struggle against a nation of spongers.

BZZZT. Wrong. Close, but no cigar - 2 of the 4 protagonists (John Galt and Ragnar Danneskjold) were utterly penniless. Of the other two, Francisco d'Anconia was purposefully squandering his fortune and his driving his copper company into the ground to punish moochers, and Dagny Taggart was the only one trying to stay within society, and that was the main focus of the book - the struggle to remain ethical in a society which strove to destroy the mind.

The millionaires, whom she portrays as Atlas holding the world aloft, withdraw their labour, with the result that the nation collapses.

The majority of the strikers weren't millionaires. The majority of the strikes had no money, or had been pushed to the breaking point by Anti-Competition laws.

It is rescued, through unregulated greed and selfishness, by one of the heroic plutocrats, John Galt.

Nope. The books ends with Dagny observing a bleak and dying society, strangling itself.

The poor die like flies as a result of government programmes and their own sloth and fecklessness.

As do the rich.

Those who try to help them are gassed. In a notorious passage, she argues that all the passengers in a train filled with poisoned fumes deserved their fate. One, for instance, was a teacher who taught children to be team players; one was a mother married to a civil servant, who cared for her children; one was a housewife "who believed that she had the right to elect politicians, of whom she knew nothing".

The point of the passage was to humanize the characters, to add some meaning and impact to their deaths - and to show that they were as varied as any group can be. The only person who actually died from being 'gassed' was the conductor, whose last sight was the headlight of the diesel train that was about to plow into his train.

See, what that passage highlights is thought evasion and responsibility shrugging. No one was willing to be a responsible adult and say "No, don't drive that coal engine into a miles long tunnel through the mountain!" No one was willing to be a responsible adult and say "The Government Special (the train) is past due to come through the tunnel, we need to keep the tracks clear for them." Instead, Politician Kip Chalmers threw a fit that he was being held up because there was no safe engine to take through the tunnel. He ran around threatening jobs and demanding people let him have his way. Since no one wanted to be responsible, they all just avoided thinking about the possible consequences - which of course, lead to the disaster in that passage.

Rand's is the philosophy of the psychopath, a misanthropic fantasy of cruelty, revenge and greed.

Monbiot's interpretation, perhaps - but again, nothing monstrous about ethical egoism. Read Anthem, read the Fountainhead, read the Virtue of Selfishness. Get an actual understanding of Rand's philosophy before trying to understand Atlas Shrugged, in which the philosophy takes a back seat to the presentation.

Yet, as Gary Weiss shows in his new book, Ayn Rand Nation, she has become to the new right what Karl Marx once was to the left: a demigod at the head of a chiliastic cult. Almost one third of Americans, according to a recent poll, have read Atlas Shrugged, and it now sells hundreds of thousands of copies every year.

And less than 1/3 of them will accurately grasp the message. They will be part of the cult she damned.

Ignoring Rand's evangelical atheism, the Tea Party movement has taken her to its heart.

Yet not she it to hers.

No rally of theirs is complete without placards reading "Who is John Galt?" and "Rand was right".

I often feel the same, and I'm not a tea-bagger. Not all tea-baggers are mindless twits, though I'm certain the majority of them are exactly the kind of moocher she condemned.

Rand, Weiss argues, provides the unifying ideology which has "distilled vague anger and unhappiness into a sense of purpose". She is energetically promoted by the broadcasters Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santelli. She is the guiding spirit of the Republicans in Congress.

Spin doctors quote mining her as bad as their bible or an interview with Dawkins. Discussing the way its abused by people who were condemned by its originator is a red herring and has nothing to do with the pros and cons of Objectivism. Just like no matter how often they quote their jesus, he was still a communist.

Like all philosophies, Objectivism is absorbed, secondhand, by people who have never read it. I believe it is making itself felt on this side of the Atlantic: in the clamorous new demands to remove the 50p tax band for the very rich, for instance; or among the sneering, jeering bloggers who write for the Telegraph and the Spectator, mocking compassion and empathy, attacking efforts to make the word a kinder place.

Ironic that he criticizes "sneering, jeering bloggers." Once more, my earlier statement.

It is not hard to see why Rand appeals to billionaires. She offers them something that is crucial to every successful political movement: a sense of victimhood. She tells them that they are parasitised by the ungrateful poor and oppressed by intrusive, controlling governments.

And again, he nor the ones he's referring to have read the book or developed even an infantile grasp of the philosophy.

It is harder to see what it gives the ordinary teabaggers, who would suffer grievously from a withdrawal of government. But such is the degree of misinformation which saturates this movement and so prevalent in the US is Willy Loman syndrome (the gulf between reality and expectations) that millions blithely volunteer themselves as billionaires' doormats.

Those of us who do bust our asses to get by and feel foolish and used every time we see some welfare mama walking her herd of children down the street, won't suffer from a loss of government. We'd do well and make things better.

I wonder how many would continue to worship at the shrine of Ayn Rand if they knew that towards the end of her life she signed on for both Medicare and social security. She had railed furiously against both programmes, as they represented everything she despised about the intrusive state. Her belief system was no match for the realities of age and ill health.

While I know the reality of this, citation needed to show how much the writer actually has bothered to learn of it, or if he's just parroting something back. The reality is far different from the way the words present it.

Not to mention prejudicial language.

But they have a still more powerful reason to reject her philosophy: as Adam Curtis's BBC documentary showed last year, the most devoted member of her inner circle was Alan Greenspan, former head of the US Federal Reserve. Among the essays he wrote for Rand were those published in a book he co-edited with her called Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal. Here, starkly explained, you'll find the philosophy he brought into government. There is no need for the regulation of business, even builders or Big Pharma, he argued, as "the 'greed' of the businessman or, more appropriately, his profit-seeking "¦ is the unexcelled protector of the consumer". As for bankers, their need to win the trust of their clients guarantees that they will act with honour and integrity. Unregulated capitalism, he maintains, is a "superlatively moral system".

Once in government, Greenspan applied his guru's philosophy to the letter, cutting taxes for the rich, repealing the laws constraining banks, refusing to regulate the predatory lending and the derivatives trading which eventually brought the system down. Much of this is already documented, but Weiss shows that in the US, Greenspan has successfully airbrushed history.

Despite the many years he spent at her side, despite his previous admission that it was Rand who persuaded him that "capitalism is not only efficient and practical but also moral", he mentioned her in his memoirs only to suggest that it was a youthful indiscretion, and this, it seems, is now the official version. Weiss presents powerful evidence that even today Greenspan remains her loyal disciple, having renounced his partial admission of failure to Congress.

Funny, the thing I condemned Greenspan for was the Bailout Tax Refund.

In a paper I wrote on the topic, two paragraphs:

The opponents of capitalism are many, though. Alan Greenspan has gone quickly from a pinnacle of capitalist integrity to a bailout hungry socialist. People like Naomi Klein leap on events like the Bailout Bill as an example of the failings of capitalism, and even purport that Greenspan's personal inconsistencies prove that capitalism is a failure (Naomi Klein, Greenspan and the Myth of the True Believer, The Nation 15 October 2007). This type of logical fallacy, which she uses against capitalism, is called a post hoc ergo propter hoc4, as well as being a tu quoque ad hominem5.

Others opponents of capitalism are not always aware of the position they are taking. For instance, in 1993 Community Groups used shame and threats of legal action to force banks into lending to people who simply were not credit worthy (Saul Hansell, Shamed by Publicity, Banks Stress Minority Mortgages, New York Times; 30 August 1993). This was the beginning of what came to be called the Housing Bubble and Credit Crunch, the very source of today's current market turbulence. Not only a single institute, but an entire industry, was put under the thumb of social groups, and their money was taken through shame and force as opposed to honest effort. This unethical action has in turn contributed to the downfall we see today.

Saturated in her philosophy, the new right on both sides of the Atlantic continues to demand the rollback of the state, even as the wreckage of that policy lies all around. The poor go down, the ultra-rich survive and prosper. Ayn Rand would have approved.

Nope. She wouldn't have. I can back my assertion up with quotes and citations, but don't feel it's needed since Monbiot can make his assertion that she would have approved without any sort of support.

 

[SuedeStonn]

It's been a long time since I've read any of Ayn Rand's books but I don't recall ever seeing anything saying she was pro or anti religion. I always had the notion she was either agnostic or atheist, she seemed too grounded in 'reality' to be one of the religious 'believers' or take anything on 'faith'.

 

[Epiquinn]

Here's Ayn Rand on religion:

 

[DepricatedZero]

It's been a long time since I've read any of Ayn Rand's books but I don't recall ever seeing anything saying she was pro or anti religion. I always had the notion she was either agnostic or atheist, she seemed too grounded in 'reality' to be one of the religious 'believers' or take anything on 'faith'.

I can't watch Epiquinn's video from work. I don't recall what she says in it. I've seen it before, and if I recall it was along the lines of "religion is silly."

But she often refers to mystics and lumps religious figures with the rest of the societal leeches.

 

[atheisthistorian]

And yet Randians and Objectivists are among the most dogmatic people I have ever encountered. Just like the religious, they cling to silly ideas, just like the religious they're quick to yell heretic at those who point out their silliness (except they usually say, "statist" or "parasite).

Replacing religion with worship of selfishness and the market is not a huge step up.

 

[DepricatedZero]

And yet Randians and Objectivists are among the most dogmatic people I have ever encountered. Just like the religious, they cling to silly ideas, just like the religious they're quick to yell heretic at those who point out their silliness (except they usually say, "statist" or "parasite).

Replacing religion with worship of selfishness and the market is not a huge step up.

This!

It's so true, and why even though I really like Rand's ideas, I'm loath to associate with them. She was absolutely certain in her own philosophy and often said that anything other than what she believed wasn't hers and wasn't Objectivism (which is true enough in a self-evident A is A sort of way). I'm not aware of her ever suggesting someone dogmatically follow her words though, so much of her message was "think for yourself you damned fool."

It's why the likes of Peikoff make me groan.

 

[ImprobableJoe]

It's so true, and why even though I really like Rand's ideas, I'm loath to associate with them.

And what ideas were those?

 

[DepricatedZero]

In short, Egoism. Other concepts as well, but that's the big one. I am an Egoist (not an Objectivist or other such nonsense).

 

[ImprobableJoe]

In short, Egoism. Other concepts as well, but that's the big one. I am an Egoist (not an Objectivist or other such nonsense).

Yeah... maybe we shouldn't play Portal 2, if you're not going to take my self-interest into account.

 

[DepricatedZero]

In short, Egoism. Other concepts as well, but that's the big one. I am an Egoist (not an Objectivist or other such nonsense).

Yeah... maybe we shouldn't play Portal 2, if you're not going to take my self-interest into account.

But my core's survival depends on your continued testing success!

Or we could be Team Falling Into Acid Force