“If Anyone Will Not Work, Let Him Not Eat.”
The Christian religion is a religion of self-reliance combined with *voluntary* Charity given by believers to those who are incapable of work.
For those for whom this simple statement isn’t enough, Jesus himself retold it in the form of a parable.
Then the Kingdom of Heaven will be like ten virgins, who took their lamps, and went out to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. Those who were foolish, when they took their lamps, took no oil with them, but the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps. Now while the bridegroom delayed, they all slumbered and slept. But at midnight there was a cry, “Behold! The bridegroom is coming! Come out to meet him!” Then all those virgins arose, and trimmed their lamps. The foolish said to the wise, “Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.” But the wise answered, saying, “What if there isn’t enough for us and you? You go rather to those who sell, and buy for yourselves.” While they went away to buy, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went in with him to the marriage feast, and the door was shut. Afterward the other virgins also came, saying, “Lord, Lord, open to us.” But he answered, “Most certainly I tell you, I don’t know you.”
The Christian is industrious, prepared, and self-reliant.
Rand’s philosophy is not incompatible with true Christianity. It is incompatible with the false gospel of the Sojouners.
I know Paine believed in God but didn't believe that Jesus was the literal Son of God or God in the flesh.
It sounds like Rand may be in that category. But I don't know. That line about, "In the beginning was Logic and Logic was with God and Logic was God", I find fascinating.
I was an Ayn Rand rah rah back in the 60’s and greedily devoured everything she wrote. Nathanial Brandon came to speak on our campus and his presentation totally turned me against Objectivism. First of all, and please it’s been many years... he said in essence, to take everything they have to say to the letter, it’s all or none. Secondly, any form of religion is not Objectivist and to love one another as Christ teaches, is absurd, love of self comes first.
He made it very clear that you cannot pick and choose what they offered... you must swallow it whole. Isn’t that kinda like religion? Would one be an objectivist if they took 100% of what someone else said? It just seemed to be contradictory and certainly against who Jesus is in my life.
To the extent that Rand was yearning for freedom, you can. The Gospel message is that you can be FREE in Christ. Perfect freedom.
2 Peter 2:19
They promise them freedom, while they themselves are slaves of depravity—for “people are slaves to whatever has mastered them.”
2 Corinthians 3:17
Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.
Rand was a product of her Soviet environment. She did not have the benefit of religious influence in her young life, and left on her own, didn’t explore anything beyond what she witnessed through her own eyes. A realist to the max.
But she DID see the horrors of collective thought that suppressed individual achievement and personal success. And she saw man’s ugly side, the desire to profit from the work of others.
In the name of compassion, we’ve taken that concept to a whole new level of it being forced instead of voluntary. Rand saw this dangerous trend here, saw what it did to the human spirit in Russia, and developed her philosophy of Objectivism. Sure, it’s not even remotely like Christianity or any other religion, but it does overlap quite nicely.
So she was an atheist. She still had a lot to say of value.
To attempt to reconcile Ayn Rand to the Gospel is an act of futility or idolatry. Psalm 14:1; 53:1.
Then, read Acts 2:42-47 for how the early church lived and then 2 Corinthians 8:10-15 for the way the churches were supposed to act toward each other in this part of the Church Age.
Rand was against charity. Try this; Ephesians 4;28.
Ayn Rand’s philosophy is interesting but evil. Either God is on the throne of your heart or you are. If you are, then you are serving the Devil himself. Enjoy the ride.
The best parts of Rand’s Objectivism are thinly disguised elements of theistic Natural Law, painted over with a thin patina of atheism to make them palatable to a broader audience. Objectivism recognizes a great truth, also accepted by theistic Natural Law, that economic process works best in terms of matching needs to resources when it is conceived of as the interaction of self-interested peers. However, it arrives at this right conclusion for the wrong reason. Reality is objective and reason may be used to discover much about it. But reality is also bigger than anything we can see with either our eyes or our minds. Limiting our definition of morality, as Rand recommends, to asking the single question, “What’s in it for me,” falls well short of the better solution provided in theistic Natural Law as the Founders used it.
Why? Because without rights being a grant from the Creator, there is no logical stopping point whereby we may prevent ourselves from descending into the Nietzschean nightmare struggle for individual dominance, the surrender of all reason and morality to an eternal battle among selfish selves, irresolvable for lack of an Arbiter. This, BTW, is why Marxism and Objectivism end up at the same destination. Marxism, as a system of ideals, is nothing but a facade to get buy-in from useful idiots; the real game is what it has always been, what Rand and Nietzsche say it is, that some pigs end up being more equal than others, just because they can be. In the end, there is no separating Rand from Nietzsche, and therefore there is, apart from principles borrowed illegitimately from theistic Natural Law, no reconciling Rand with Christian theism.
Weak argument. See my blog post on this topic at www.offgridblogger.wordpress.com.
A nonsensical headline.
Ayn Rand was the only one who could reconcile Ayn Rand with the Gospel, and she refused to do so.
I didn’t expect this article. It’s thought provoking.
Theism of any sort assumes as it's most basic principle that there is a superior creature, with knowledge and a code of living that is superior to what man can divine for himself.
Objectivism puts nothing higher than the self.
Alas, you've strayed into contorted theological waters here. You cannot define God's essence as logic and reason. Both names are limited concepts which are not the entirety of the essence of God which is greater than being itself. You can say plenty about Him being the source of such concepts, but all things we say that God "is" are analogies. Even the claim God "is" love is inadequate; he is love, but he is more than a human concept.
One reason that you cannot say that God is reason is that he does not think or know by means of sentenced predication, images, or sensory input. Such things are a limitation because they are constituents of something, and nothing is a constituent of God. Nothing can be predicated of the infinite God. He has no parts. He is one God in three persons, but he has no components. The Word Logos for the Greeks meant more than logic and reason, it could simply mean "word" for instance. It was obviously metaphoric for the second person of the trinity, but all distinctions in God are internal distinctions.
Why this is important is because we can stray into tri-theism, or polytheism if we are not careful.
But your post is thought provoking nonetheless.
To argue that the work of Christians be dismissed is to argue for the dismissal of a large percentage of the advances and breakthroughs in mathematics, physics, and biomedical science that have been achieved over the last several centuries.
That door swings both ways.
It is interesting that this article if featured at this time of year when Christians commemorate the resurrection. Ayn Rand the objectivist yet she rejects the most objective religious fact, the resurrection. The resurrection actually happened.
Rand was right on her stand against collectivism, I’ll give her that, but as a Christian conservative when you leave out the “Christian” part you can count me out. No wonder she is such a darling of the Libertarians. Rand is an atheist, that’s all I need to know. Her so called objectivism is just so much blah, blah.
>> “ To argue that the work of atheists be dismissed is to argue for the dismissal of a large percentage of the advances and breakthroughs in mathematics, physics, and biomedical science that have been achieved over the last several centuries.” <<
.
Sorry, but that is false.
Until the age of government financing of “research” few atheists produced anything at all.
ping
A more sensible question is whether Rand can be reconciled with Ragnar Redbeard's Might Makes Right and La Vey's Satanic Bible. The answer is a resounding yes, since all three are made of the same sort of stuff.