Posted on 09/18/2009 9:22:24 AM PDT by Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus
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Ayn Rand was an Atheist.
The prominent Founding Fathers shared her views.
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It's interesting you mention Ayn Rand. She - and modern libertarianism in general - are not classical liberalism. They are a Romantic (mis)interpretation of classical liberalism.
Dirty little secret among the left is their absolute desire to depopulate this planet by any means possible.
Hurray for the CU archive page! This works perfect for me because I have so many passwords now that I can’t keep track of them anymore!
“Cabalistic Christianity, which is Catholic Christianity, and which has prevailed for 1,500 years, has received a mortal wound, of which the monster must finally die. Yet so strong is his constitution, that he may endure for centuries before he expires.”
— John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, July 16, 1814
“What havoc has been made of books through every century of the Christian era? Where are fifty gospels condemned as spurious by the bull of Pope Gelasius? Where are forty wagon-loads of Hebrew manuscripts burned in France, by order of another pope, because of suspected heresy? Remember the Index Expurgato-rius, the Inquisition, the stake, the axe, the halter, and the guillotine; and, oh! horrible, the rack! This is as bad, if not worse, than a slow fire. Nor should the Lion’s Mouth be forgotten. Have you considered that system of holy lies and pious frauds that has raged and triumphed for 1,500 years.”
— John Adams, letter to John Taylor, 1814, quoted by Norman Cousins in In God We Trust: The Religious Beliefs and Ideas of the American Founding Fathers (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), p. 106-7, from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief
“God is an essence that we know nothing of. Until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world.”
— John Adams, “this awful blashpemy” that he refers to is the myth of the Incarnation of Christ, from Ira D Cardiff, What Great Men Think of Religion
“... the Common Law existed while the Anglo-Saxons were yet pagans, at a time when they had never yet heard the name of Christ pronounced or knew that such a character existed.”
— Thomas Jefferson, letter to Major John Cartwright, June 5, 1824.
“In the affairs of the world, men are saved, not by faith, but by the want of it.”
“I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life, I absenteed myself from Christian assemblies.”
— Benjamin Franklin
“The founders of our nation were nearly all Infidels, and that of the presidents who had thus far been elected [Washington; Adams; Jefferson; Madison; Monroe; Adams; Jackson] not a one had professed a belief in Christianity.”
“Among all our presidents from Washington downward, not one was a professor of religion, at least not of more than Unitarianism.”
— The Reverend Doctor Bird Wilson, an Episcopal minister in Albany, New York, in a sermon preached in October, 1831. One might expect a modern defender of the Evangelical to play with the meaning of “Christianity,” making it refer only to a specific brand of orthodoxy, first sentence quoted in John E Remsberg, Six Historic Americans, second sentence quoted in Paul F Boller, George Washington & Religion, pp. 14-15
Imagine current presidential candidates making such opinions heard out loud. They need to feign belief, like Obama.
Great article, thanks for posting it. It reminds me of something that has intrigued me for a long time. I have visited the Shenandoah Mts. of Virginia many times, and each time I go I am made aware of the people who used to live in those mountains till the 1930’s. They were re-located when the U.S. government decided that the land they had lived on since before the Revolution would better serve a growing affluent population as a tourist destination rather than as their home. Eugenics promoting social workers declared that since the people were , in their opinion, backwards, it would be to their best interest to move. Here again we see where the government and its minions of pseudo intellectuals know better than the actual individual.
Thanks for posting.
BM
That isn't going to fly here on FR. We know better.
Try it over at DU.
Yawn... see #9.
No, I don't think that's quite right OldSpice. Not that Ayn Rand wasn't an atheist. She was. What I'm driving at is Ayn Rand shared some of the Founding Fathers' views. She simply edited out all the parts she disagreed with.
For instance, she was glad to accept bennies like unalienable rights. But she thought she could ignore the Founding Fathers' insistence that the only thing that makes a right unalienable is because it is the direct grant of the Creator. And of course, this Creator is the God of Judeo-Christian tradition, itself the major bulwark of natural law theory.
The way the Founding Fathers understood the idea of unalienable right — e.g., life, liberty, property (or "pursuit of happiness") — was to see it as something imbued in human nature itself. And it was the Creator Who directly did the "imbuing" when He created man.
Sneer at that, anyone who wants to. But you'd be sneering at the Founding Fathers if you did.
According to natural law theory, God, being Creator and ultimate authority of His creation, is thus universally superior to the State — i.e., to any human system of government — in the order of natural justice. From whence it follows that no State has the power or authority to set aside, abridge, tamper with, etc., any direct grant of God.
In short, the Founders knew something that Rand didn't: It is the authority of God alone that authenticates and defends the natural, unalienable rights of every human person.
Natural law/natural justice — the basis of American justice — is "natural" because it is founded in God. All other systems of "justice" are founded in the ideologies of transient intellectuals.
Evidently Rand thought that unalienable rights could be secured on some other basis than that which the Founding Fathers insisted upon. But she never really tells us what that basis is.
I gather the dear lady just had an enormous blind spot.
Meanwhile, natural law theory is under attack and traduced from all sides nowadays — as Linda Kimball's splendid article so cogently documents.
I think Whittaker Chambers perfectly summed up why Ayn Rand is not a traditional conservative (as opposed to our founding fathers) when he wrote “Big Sister is Watching You.” Here’s a link to it over at National Review:
http://www.nationalreview.com/flashback/flashback200501050715.asp
I can't think of one who was an atheist. I can think of several who were Deists.
Is that what you mean ?
INDEED.
AS DO A LOT OF pontificators, even some hereon.
You are misinformed.
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