Galt's Gulch

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  • Posted by ewv 9 years, 2 months ago
    Ayn Rand advocated a philosophy of reason and consequently emphatically rejected all forms of the supernatural, faith as a means to knowledge, and in ethics human sacrifice and the notion of duty -- which are all fundamentally opposed to her philosophy of reason and egoism. To fully understand what she meant by this and why, as well as the relation of her ideas to other philosophical ideas of different kinds, requires first understanding her philosophy and her reasons for it. Atheism -- the rejection of theism -- is a consequence of a philosophy of reason, not the starting point.

    You can get a first-hand summary of her views on religion in the form of collections of quotations and their sources beginning at http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/rel... and following up with the links at the end leading to the related specific topics (listed alphabetically): Abortion; Agnosticism; Altruism; Art; Atheism; Birth Control; Communism; “Conservatives”; Dark Ages; Faith; God; Man; Man-Worship; Morality; Mysticism; Original Sin; Philosophy; Primacy of Existence vs. Primacy of Consciousness; Reason; Sacred; Sacrifice; Sex; Soul-Body Dichotomy; Supernaturalism.

    This is helpful for research, but how well you understand such a collection of statements outside of the context in which they appeared will depend on how much you understand her philosophy. It is best to pursue that systematically rather than trying to get a coherent understanding by navigating links.
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  • Posted by rbuckwalter 9 years, 2 months ago
    Outstanding response, thank you all! Having only read Atlas Shrugged I was curious because I see no way to reconcile the philosophy of reason with the supernatural or theism. I am not an anti-theist, but as an atheist I am increasingly disturbed by the havoc that religion and superstition wreak in our world.
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  • Posted by $ MichaelAarethun 9 years, 2 months ago
    There is now. I just reviewed the Mike Wallace interviews and some other sources hunting up that Anthem quote. Off the top of my head she stated the difference between that which is taken on faith and that which is proven fact holding that to be objective and now we get to the discussion on practical and pragmatic meaning is it factual and useful it's the opposite of faith. Another part of it was fear of the unknown assuaged by a faith in the unknown. Concept of after life. Fear of the dark all of that would be failure to recognize the fact that we are not as good at dark adaptation as some species and also a fact that there are things that go bump in the night which are the species that sleep days and hunt nights And not the failure but the need to not look at reality of learning how to see better at night which most any graduate of basic training has mastered except in the merchant marine academies. Dark Adaptation techniques followed by technical means - torches, candles, flashlights, binoculars, infrared, starlight scopes etc.

    It's much simpler to take some things on faith rather than use one of creations greatest triumphs - and solve the problem.

    But the witch doctors made a killing off of it for thousands of years an still do.

    One of the conversations betwen the Italian Socialist Party leader Mussolini and the Russian/Internationale leader Lenin brought uip the question of Marxist Economics."How do you teach what you don't understand?" Lenin's answer was 'don't teach it preach it.' then mention the party has people who do understand and they will take care of it for you.
    turned out Mussolini was correct it was one of those things that go bump in the night and don't survive the evolutionary process.

    The rest of it is Amazon has many inexpensive books on the subject including

    " Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves – or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth."

    " From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from one attribute of man – the function of his reasoning mind."

    "That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call 'free will' is your mind's freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character."

    "Man is a being with free will; therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and it's up to him to decide by his own reasoning mind which he wants to be."

    " There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think."


    "When I die, I hope to go to Heaven, whatever the Hell that is."
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  • Posted by $ MikeMarotta 9 years, 2 months ago
    We discuss this often with much heat and not much light. Ayn Rand was an atheist. However, she said that she was a committed atheist, not a militant one. On the Tom Snyder show, she assented to the phrase "God bless America", recognizing "God" to mean only the best or the highest. Also, in a once-hidden but now-famous letter to one Reverend Dudley in 1943, she said that Christianity was the first religion concerned with the individual.

    On the metaphysics of religion, for her the arguments were simple and powerful. First, the burden of proof is on those who posit the existence of God (or whatever). Lacking proof, there is no reason to believe. Rationally, by definition, the universe is everything that exists. To create existence, God would have to be outside of existence, that is, non-existent. To claim that the universe needs a creator but God does not is to beg the question of creation.

    She also rejected altruism, of course, and you have to stretch to find a religion that does not preach self-sacrifice and self-denial. She also insisted that the altruism and collectivism of religion is proximate cause of wars and other suffering. She excoriated political conservatives - writing an obituary for American political conservativism - because of its religious foundation.

    This is a dialog from The Fountainhead:
    "So you see, Mr. Roark, though it is to be a religious ediface, it is also more than that. You notice that we call it the Temple of the Human Spirit. We want to capture--in stone, as others capture in music--not some narrow creed, but the essence of all religion. And what is the essence of religion? The great aspiration of the human spirit toward the highest, the noblest, the best. The human spirit as the creator and the conqueror of the ideal. The great life-giving force of the universe. The heroic human spirit. That is your assignment, Mr. Roark."
    ...
    "Mr. Stoddard, I'm afraid you've made a mistake," he said, his voice slow and tired. "I don't think I'm the man you want. I don't think it would be right for me to undertake. I don't believe in God."
    ...
    "That doesn't matter. You're a profoundly religious man, Mr. Roark--in your own way. I can see that in your buildings."
    ...
    "That's true," said Road. It was almost a whisper.
    ...
    "I wish to call it God. You may choose another name. But what I want in that building is your spirit. Your spirit, Mr. Roark. Give me the best of that--and you will have done your job, as I shall have done mine. Do not worry about the meaning I wish to convey. Let it be your spirit in the shape of a building--and it will have that meaning, whether you know it or not."     (Cited here: http://www.galtsgulchonline.com/posts...

    That said, Ayn Rand was a man-worshipper.
    Ayn Rand's essay in The Objectivist, which was also her new Introduction written for a reprinting of The Fountainhead.

    Just as religion has pre-empted the field of ethics, turning morality against man, so it has usurped the highest moral concepts of our language, placing them outside this earth and beyond man’s reach. ..."

    [Exaltation, worship, reverence, and sacred do have meanings, she says, but not the ones given by most religions.]

    But such concepts do name actual emotions, even though no supernatural dimension exists; and these emotions are experienced as uplifting or ennobling...
    [...]
    It is in this sense, with this meaning and intention, that I would identify the sense of life dramatized in The Fountainhead as man worship.
    [...]
    The man-worshipers, in my sense of the term, are those who see man’s highest potential and strive to actualize it. . . . [Man-worshipers are] those dedicated to the exaltation of man’s self-esteem and the sacredness of his happiness on earth."
    -- from The Ayn Rand Lexicon: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/man...
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