Posted on 04/18/2011 1:59:33 AM PDT by EternalVigilance
“The main message of Atlas Shrugged is a brilliant and important one. I don’t care what Rand’s other beliefs were. I’m an adult. I can filter them out.” I too can filter them out. Sometimes the poison is chemo, If a little poison can kill the cancer; then the host will survive. There is plenty of cancer in our present administration. I say give it enough poison to kill the cancer so that the Republic survives. I’m an eleven year cancer survivor. Amen.
Great, you’re going to spend all your energy attacking Ayn Rand and Objectivism, when they control nothing, and you are going to ignore the socialists destroying the country.
Why are you making the perfect the enemy of the good?
I’m a conservative and a Christian. I don’t believe everything Ayn Rand said or wrote, but her books are powerful arguments against the tyranny of collectivism and strong promotions of capitalism and liberty.
In a pitched fight with Islam, would you kick any Jews willing to fight with you?
Would you prefer to fight a distinct denomination of Christians or Mormons or Hindus or Buddhists or Shintoists if they were willing to fight and bleed with you against fascism, communism, or islamism?
You are a fool.
We have nothing to fight over. We own nothing, we control nothing. We are loosing everything, and you want to fight good allies because of your own intolerance; your insistence that anybody sharing your foxhole must agree with you 100%.
When they said we need to hang together or we will surely hang separately, you were the guy who said, “I want to be hanged separately because his shirt offends my sense of color.”
God save us; because these perfectionists are our worst enemies.
Should we assume that the polar opposite views of Marx, Lenin, and Mao are god-centered, selfless, non-materialistic, pro-Christian, and pro-American?
You have just described the Roman Catholic Church, the Greek Orthodox and every major Christian denomination.
If you accept God has granted mankind free will, you must also accept the potential dangers of using it. In retrospect, a defining moment in the growth of my standards for civic responsibility was watching an interview with Ayn Rand on “60 Minutes” when I was in my teens. Her opposition to altruism made a lot of sense to me.
Owe what you will to your deity but I don’t owe my life to the government. It already takes what it will from me by threat of imprisonment. That isn’t freedom, it’s the illusion of freedom.
PING PING PING PING PING!!!!
True Liberty is not license. Those who think as you, sir, pervert liberty, and destroy the fundamental principles that allow a culture to thrive economically. This is the error of libertarian philosophy.
What libertarianism proposes is moral relativism under the pretense of “non-interference.” However, in the final measure, the result is that guaranteed outcome of any morally ambiguous system, which denies human nature and the transcendent truths that govern all cause and effect relationships. In practice the imagined utopia of the libertarian is identical in its altruistic deception to that of atheistic communism; and the outcome is predictable: the destruction of the individual and the corporate body of humanity we call society.
Libertarians think they may advance the cause of “social liberalism” simultaneously with “fiscal conservatism;” but this duality of purpose is folly, and works diametrically and insidiously against itself. The social plagues induced by such novel philosophies invariably drain the public treasury, render the distinctions of absolute right and wrong to ambiguity, destroy public confidence in justice, and dissolve private wealth.
Human society does not and cannot exist in a moral vacuum. A society that having no absolute standards of conduct defers all decisions to the individual, exercising little or no restraint on behavior, abdicates the single most legitimate purpose of the state: to increase the common good and uphold the moral order. To quote Edmond Burke:
“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, — in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity, — in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption, — in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”
-— Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791)
A corrupt society, filled with men of licentious inclinations, cannot maintain its economic stability; or do you suppose the folly of the Roman Republic is worth revisiting in our times? “Give us bread and circuses!”
Economics does not transcend moral absolutes. Economics does not trump the Natural Law. History proves conclusively that no immoral or amoral culture can long prosper, nor survive its growing litany of perversions against the Natural Law; for such a corrupt body becomes its own undoing. Unfettered liberty generates unfettered vice.
Vice is not virtue; even if for a time libertarianism may advance a nation’s economic standing, it remains a foundation of sand because it denies the absolute transcendent truth indelibly stamped on the consciousness of every man by He who created all things. God is not mocked.
To espouse, and expound, and proselytize such vileness; to have the sheer audacity and lack of concern for your fellow man to spew such vileness where others might hear or be moved by it is madness. It is beyond madness. It is like spraying a schoolroom full of children with a .50 caliber machine gun, laughing.
Barking mad.
May Rand burn forever in Hell, and may all know it.
;-\
That's the key point. If one were crazy and conspiratorial, one might think of this article as your typical wedge used covertly to divide natural allies.
Her view was the Christian view, that one must give willingly, and not be forced (2Cor.9) or else it is not a virtue.
She had the highest admiration of those who risked their lives for others, as long as it was done willingly.
She made a great speech at West Point honoring the military's willingness to serve the cause of freedom.
Many of the Founding Father's were not Christians.
These "Christians" you refer to are the same ones as the "Christians" who strap bombs to themselves and their children, and then go into populated public areas like schools and shopping malls, and blow themselves and everyone else up.
They do not exist, except in your feverd imagination. No Christian alive would ever even consider doing such a thing. You speak like an atheist who read all the wrong labels growing up. A dull one at that.
;-/
LOL, hyperbole much?
;-\
Swallow much pus?
You should keep your sexual preference out of this debate.
LOL
8^D
Wow! Who would have thought Obama read Ayn Rand?
Really, is your daddy going to come beat me up, tough guy?
The Groton influence of Endicott Peabody showed in a speech Roosevelt gave at the People's Forum in Troy, NY in 1912. There he declared that western Europeans and Americans had achieved victory in the struggle for "the liberty of the individual," and that the new agenda should be a "struggle for the liberty of the community." The wrong ethos for a new age was, "every man does as he sees fit, even with a due regard to law and order." The new order should be, "march on with civilization in a way satisfactory to the well-being of the great majority of us."
In that speech Roosevelt outlined the philosophical base of what would eventually become the New Deal. He also forecast the rhetorical mode by which "community" could loom over individual liberty. "If we call the method regulation, people hold up their hands in horror and say ‘un-American,' or ‘dangerous,'" Roosevelt pointed out. "But if we call the same identical process co-operation, these same old fogeys will cry out ‘well done'.... cooperation is as good a word for the new theory as any other."
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