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  • Posted by Zenphamy 9 years, 11 months ago
    Troubling discussion. He sees a need to 'make' people good. He sees that as the major need of society, to 'make' people, to 'mold' them, to have laws to control behavior.

    That's evil, the epitome of wrongness.
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  • Posted by irrelevantcommentforpoint 9 years, 11 months ago
    Were the people of Germany (who did nothing while Hitler ordered Jews killed) bad, or were they coerced and threatened with great force?
    The 'arguments' made are shallow and unsupportable.
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    • Posted by $ MikeMarotta 9 years, 11 months ago
      IR4P, the origins of "German guilt" for the holocaust are a multifaceted tangle. Fundamentally, the vast majority of Germans were NOT coerced with great force, but only acted in concert according to their shared beliefs. Adolph Hitler was a commanding public speaker who announced a mishmash of bad ideas - wrong perceptions, lack of inspection, poor integration, and a blank-out on consequences as evidence. But he was not alone. He had competitors who later joined his cause and whose own garble resonated with the masses. And Germany was not alone. Greece, Poland, Hungary, France... In every nation, maybe some isolated individuals or rare institutions existed, but largely, the entire continent was given over to Kant and Hegel. And it infected America.

      I offer two scenes from popular films of the time. In the opening of _All Quiet on the Western Front_ Paul Baeumer is a high school student. He is in rapture, ecstasy as he sits staring at his teacher who lectures on the Idea of the State. After the Second War, in the American movie, _The Stranger_, Orson Welles plays an escaped Nazi war criminal who hides in a New England town as a high school history teacher. At a dinner table, the boys listen attentively as he speaks of Barbarossa and Frederich the Great.

      The American Revolution is proof that you cannot coerce and threaten a population that resists.
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  • Posted by irrelevantcommentforpoint 9 years, 11 months ago
    Who decides what is good? Oh, he does, of course. I should never have doubted that he has the best interests of all the little people at heart.
    Wonder what percentage of the public school educated people will recognize his agenda?
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    • Posted by $ MikeMarotta 9 years, 11 months ago
      IR4P, if you read about Dennis Prager, you will find out that while he might indeed subscribe to a free will theory of human action, as an active religionist, for Prager, the question is not how to discover for yourself how to live a good life, but how to understand God's Commandments. He summarizes a political agenda based on "E pluribus Unum" and "In God We Trust" and then in Liberty. The problem, of course, is that the first two make Liberty impossible.

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      • Posted by Robbie53024 9 years, 11 months ago
        No, actually he sees religion (at least most religion - not sure if he would include Islam in that) to be a means of creating "good" people. Otherwise, they will tend towards "badness." Given human history, and all evidence shown personally, I think his theory is more viable than yours.
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  • Posted by $ MikeMarotta 9 years, 11 months ago
    If the political message of the "Atlas Shrugged" movies resonated with you, then you should investigate Ayn Rand's non-ficiton works, beginning with _The Virtue of Selfishness_. You can find other anthologies such as _Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal_. Those are largely expositions on current events of her time. Regarding this video, and Prager University, Dennis Prager's biography on Wikipedia explains his intellectual context. As a practicing Jew, he assumes that altruism is good and he lectures on the importance of "Judeo-Christian values" blaming our social problems on "secular leftists." I do agree with his observation that those who believe that people are basically good (or evil) will share about the same moral values whether or not they believe in God.

    And - as he does not state - if you accept that people are not _basically_ moral or immoral but _make themselves_ one or the other, then you share much with yet another loose group.
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  • Posted by Robbie53024 9 years, 11 months ago
    People are neither good nor bad. However, without external influences, they will tend to devolve to things that are considered bad, as they are more selfish and generally "easier" than what is considered good.
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    • Posted by $ MikeMarotta 9 years, 11 months ago
      Robbie, you seem not to understand _Atlas Shrugged_. If being selfish were easy, then Ayn Rand would not have challenged 2500 years of moral philosophy. Her ideas would have been accepted as commonplace. Egoism rests on reason. If you know the historical record - literally, what has been written these past 5000 years or so - then you would be hard put to find clear expositions of reason. _Atlas Shrugged_ dramatized the lives of people who chose reason and selfishness and contrasted them with those who chose mysticism and altruism. Have you seen the movie or read the book?
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