Posted on 12/27/2001 2:31:24 PM PST by Chuckmorse
The Idiotic Objectivists
While Ayn Rand, the author of Atlas Shrugged, the Fountainhead, and essays on politics, culture and philosophy, was a great advocate of free market capitalism and a significant anti-communist, she also made mistakes in her thinking which are presently being slavishly parroted by her devout coterie of followers at the Ayn Rand Institute.
While Rand publicly championed the individual, she privately insisted, according to former close associates, on a high degree of conformity within her inner circle.
This is reflected today in her followers, who call themselves Objectivists, and who tend to spout her dogma and mimic her mannerisms in a fashion that is at times positive and at times unbecoming.
A case in point is the recent article “Why Christmas Should be More Commercial” by Dr. Leonard Peikoff who referrers to himself as the foremost authority on Objectivism and is the founder of the Ayn Rand Institute.
While Peikoff revels in the commercial aspects of Christmas, he sneers at “assorted Nativity tales and altruist injunctions (e.g., love thy neighbor) that no one takes seriously.”
I would beg to differ.
Most of us, to varying degrees, enjoy the commercial aspect of Christmas and gift giving and see no contradiction between this and the religious aspect.
In this season this year, which comes on the tail of hijackers crashing planes into buildings, thousands of grieving families, friends, and a grieving nation, and anthrax in the mail, thinking about G-d, and loving thy neighbor contributes greatly to a more significant sense of meaning and purpose in life, certainly more so than a mere commercial transaction.
I don’t agree with Peikoff and his extreme atheism, I think people do take these things very seriously.
The Objectivists hold to the irrational theory of evolution which is that man somehow evolved from the primordial ooze.
They dismiss as a superstition the more rational idea, in my opinion, that the creation of life, with all of its incredible facets, had to involve a supernatural and divine aspect.
They reject the theory of creation not because it is irrational but because the Atheist Ayn Rand rejected it.
As an admirer of reason, I find the creation theory to be much more rational while at the same time providing a varied and nuanced sense of life, certainly more so than the morally neutral idea that man somehow miraculously evolved out of the mud.
In his Christmas article, Peikoff asserts “America’s tragedy is that its intellectual leaders have typically tried to replace happiness with guilt by insisting that the spiritual meaning of Christmas is religion and self sacrifice for Tiny Tim or his equivalent.”
Unless I’m missing something, America’s “intellectual leaders” haven’t insisted on religion any time recently but rather an atheistic, morally neutral, scientific socialist culture that claims to be based on “reason.”
As far as American religion being an advocate of “self sacrifice,” this is just nonsense.
Self-sacrifice is a policy of the abovementioned intellectual leaders who have no intention of sacrificing anything themselves, only the fruit of the labor of others.
Religion tends to advocate voluntary tithing for the needy and private charities.
Peikoff wants to “take the Christ out of Christmas, and turn the holiday into a guiltlessly egoistic, pro-reason, this-worldly, commercial celebration.”
His utopian idea of happiness seems to be a world where man is not fettered by such obstacles as guilt or worry about anything but the here and now.
Much of the article venerates earth-worshipping paganism, which is where many Atheists, hungering for meaning and purpose, seem to end up.
Ayn Rand and the Objectivists made great contributions to capitalism, freedom and individual rights but, unfortunately, that contribution is somewhat eclipsed by a darker side.
Perhaps Rand was more influenced by her own Stalinist high school and College education than she realized.
Either way, it’s a shame that such glaring mistakes threaten to discredit such important work. Chuck Morse Is the author of “Why I’m a Right-Wing Extremist” www.chuckmorse.com
Can anyone bring in a single scientific fact that demonstrates, irrefutably, that the Earth is not at the center of the Universe?
Why do the irrational keep seeking "proofs" for negatives? Can you prove, irrefutably, there is not a race of intelligent mice in another galazy, somewhere?
(By the way, I can prove both of the above, in case you are interested.) What's the point?
Hank
As opposed to others who DON'T have an agenda?
One thing that is for sure, everyone has an agenda, it is just a matter of whether or not you agree that makes the difference.
Is that deep enough? :-)
Well, lets take the Godless view of the universe to its natural conclusion when considering rationality.
The universe started with an uncaused random quatum event. After billions of years of Newtonian physics, Einstein relativity, and quantom mechanics... The four laws of physics randomly devloped our galaxy, later through random events our solar system and finally our earth.
Randomly the atoms of the first life form assembled which randomly started to evolve, recently the atoms of your DNA assembled. Through quantum probabilities and chance your brain's nuerons are firing in such a way for you to have the thought that there is no creator. The atoms in your brain are giving you the illusion of Aristotle logic only by chance.
One can only conclude the reason for your philosophical leanings have happened through a huge amount of random events. Starting with the big bang. I don't think I would let my philosohical outlook be guided by the premise that I think what I think through billions of random events and probabilities. However that is one's constitutional right. Be careful, sometime through some other quantum events your view may change.
FreeRepublic is the center of the universe.
There are a great many brilliant biologists and chemists who have rejected evolution, at least in any of its present manifestations, because thay all present unsurmountable objectively logical problems.
Here are a couple of simple ones: For the species to evolve, once the animals exist, each new specie requires that both a male and female of the specie come into existense at the same time.
The evolution of a web weaving spider is logically impossible. Until the spider learned how to weave a web, over how many generations, how did it eat?
(The problem with the second question raises is the one of a complete system. The proposal that spiders could have acquired food some other way until web-weaving was evolved ignores that fact that web-weaving is an extremely complex process that must have come into existense, when it did, complete.)
There are billions of similar problems.
By the way, "creationism" is not the only other possibility if evolution turns out to be proveably false, which it is likely to be.
What is extreme atheism, you are either an atheist or not. Then again in order to manufacture an attack piece against reason you have to fill it with half-truths an exaggerations. Since FreeRepublic is about to go down I will see if I can get back to this later.
What, you mean like this passage?
Historically, people have always celebrated the winter solstice as the time when the days begin to lengthen, indicating the earth's return to life. Ancient Romans feasted and reveled during the festival of Saturnalia. Early Christians condemned these Roman celebrations — they were waiting for the end of the world and had only scorn for earthly pleasures. By the fourth century, the pagans were worshipping the god of the sun on December 25, and the Christians came to a decision: if you can't stop 'em, join 'em. They claimed (contrary to known fact) that the date was Jesus' birthday, and usurped the solstice holiday for their Church.
You can't very well explain the historical evolution of Christmas as Jesus' birthday celebrated on the illogical date of Dec. 25 without mentioning its pagan roots as an end-of-the-Winter-Solstice celebration!
Even after the Christians stole Christmas, they were ambivalent about it. The holiday was inherently a pro-life festival of earthly renewal, but the Christians preached renunciation, sacrifice, and concern for the next world, not this one. As Cotton Mather, an 18th-century clergyman, put it: "Can you in your consciences think that our Holy Savior is honored by mirth? . . . Shall it be said that at the birth of our Savior . . . we take time . . . to do actions that have much more of hell than of heaven in them?"Then came the major developments of 19th-century capitalism: industrialization, urbanization, the triumph of science — all of it leading to easy transportation, efficient mail delivery, the widespread publishing of books and magazines, new inventions making life comfortable and exciting, and the rise of entrepreneurs who understood that the way to make a profit was to produce something good and sell it to a mass market.
For the first time, the giving of gifts became a major feature of Christmas. Early Christians denounced gift-giving as a Roman practice, and Puritans called it diabolical. But Americans were not to be deterred. Thanks to capitalism, there was enough wealth to make gifts possible, a great productive apparatus to advertise them and make them available cheaply, and a country so content that men wanted to reach out to their friends and express their enjoyment of life. The whole country took with glee to giving gifts on an unprecedented scale.
Just had to include the heart of Peikoff's moral argument, 'cuz it's an inspiring passage.
Hank
Note to anyone who responds to this: I'm not particularly interested in getting into a debate. I'm really just wondering what the standard non-theist response is to this sort of question.
"I don’t agree with Peikoff and his extreme atheism."
and left it at that. The rest of your post made me yawn. I think you and Peikoff deserve each other. Both equally boring.
As I understand it, that method happens sometimes with plants, and it could theoretically happen that way in animal species where brothers & sisters regularly mate. (If both a brother & a sister get the same mutation (it's possible), then they'll be compatible.) However, in general speciation does not work that way. It requires several mutations becoming common in the mutated population before it becomes difficult or impossible to breed with the original population.
The evolution of a web weaving spider is logically impossible. Until the spider learned how to weave a web, over how many generations, how did it eat?
I don't know much about spiders, though IIRC there are spider species that don't weave webs. But in general that kind of argument tends to disappear when you realize there are intermediates that also do just fine. (I'll just pretend you never typed in the next paragraph. :-)
I guess all I am suggesting is we are confined to the space-time domain. It may be possible for a creator to exist within an infinite amount of dimensions; existing outside of what we call time which began some 10 billion years ago.
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