Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn will seek to offset federal aid to victims of a massive tornado that blasted through Oklahoma City suburbs on Monday with cuts elsewhere in the budget.> more ... (0 comments)
Ever since Obama was elected, a starry-eyed Republican love affair with Ayn Rand has continued to blossom. California Republican Member of Congress John Campbell breathlessly passes out copies of Atlas Shrugged to his staff. Medicare-Hater-In-Chief Paul Ryan is a self-avowed Rand devotee. And the list goes on and on…
The thing that amazes me about all this is how willfully blind all these Rand lovers are to her well-documented hatred of religion.
Doesn’t it seem more than a little bit funny to anyone that the party of fundamentalist Christian dogma in this country is so shamefully puppy-eyed over one of the first serious modern antitheists, who preceded Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris by decades?
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THE GRAPEVINE
Funny, yes. Surprising? No — because the reality outside their own heads is the never-explored country.
i think it has something to do with their ability to do cafeteria-style religion. you know, like screaming about how evil gay people are, while engaging in premarital sex and adultery. as a former Randian, i can tell you that you really can’t pick and choose with her. she says it right in her books. if people want to Go Galt, they’d need to also abandon jeebus. otherwise they’re just dilettantes. but we knew that.
Didn’t realize you used to be a full-on Rand Fan. Interesting. I never went in that far--I had about three months as a half-hearted libertarian as a transition from James Dobson territory before arriving more or less at my present identity. I think what made me switch was that I actually became less optimistic about humanity, which made anarchy a very scary prospect. And that’s basically what most forms of that thought process boil down to for me.
I’ve actually mentioned this fact to Rand admirers I’ve run across. She was this pro-choice atheist woman that Republicans evidently think was just one of them. I doubt 5% of the people who debate her ideas on either side have actually read any amount of writing by her, myself included (I read about 30 pages of The Fountainhead before putting it aside, which I think is more than most, though if it’s close to the 1949 movie adaptation it’s got to be pretty insane).
crazy no? i’ve been through a few reincarnations so far. i used to be a big “tough love” individualist libertarian type. it was an early 20s thing -- when everything in the universe was about ME. i found an intellectual friend in her writing when it came to atheism, individualism, self-centeredness, etc. i actually have the FULL ayn rand library still hanging out in my study (70% of which I’ve actually READ! :)). after a while though, i found my heart again, and that was that :).
I never went Rand. My mom said something to me when I was, oh, maybe ten or so that stuck with me: “Some day you’re going to come to a point in your life where you’ll have to decide whether you’re going to pull up the ladder you climber behind you.”
Also, we were the beneficiaries of too much flood-relief assistance after Hurricane Agnes for me to ever go all “sochalizms”.
“climbed”.
Well, at least the story has a happy ending. Also, that 70%--is that just Atlas Shrugged? ;)
haha. exactly
Has more to do with the small number of Christians in the US and the huge number of people who call them selves Christians but want to force you to believe the way that they do. They have replaced the worship of the Lord with the worship of power and money. You can spot them easily enough by what they say and what they do.
It’s interesting to think about what constitutes the religious feelings of the folks you describe. For one thing, they’re very Old Testament — including cheerleading their capricious god for going all genocide on folks that aren’t them. And blaming it on folks that aren’t them when he goes all genocide on his own followers. For another, they’re a lot closer to neo-pagans than they’d admit to themselves — the immediacy of supernatural entities in the real world, the way they think prayer can alter reality in a way that’s pretty much one-to-one to spellcraft….
that’s a great point about the neo-paganism. just think about rick perry’s Pray for Rain solution to the droughts down there. what’s the difference between that and indian rain dances or incan human sacrifices in times of bad harvest?
Better t-shirts?
dunno, this would make a pretty good incan tshirt
It’s really a pretty lazy crosspollenization (spelling? Oh, who cares, I’m not a botanist!) of a few different ideas. From the New Testament, they get the thing about being saved by faith alone. And the apocalypse and hell, which are surprisingly not in the Old Testament at all. The conception of God is Old Testament for sure, which is pretty similar to Revelations. But the way it works is that many take the idea of a personal relationship with God to ridiculous extremes, and don’t actually read the Bible or get informed because they figure that God will tell them what they need to know (If true, why would God even send down the Bible?). Which often sounds suspiciously like what they want to do anyway, in many cases I’ve seen and heard of.
Nothing new, really, just the same old pride. Real faith is humbling. That’s the difference.
Sadly, this is nothing new. In the Middle Ages, worship of worldly power was basically what Christianity was. So I guess it could be worse? Optimistic thought of the day.
…and they got it from the Romans, and the Romans got it from the Persians, and….[cue Billy Joel]…