I disagree that communist ideology and Christianity look "similar". Communist ideology depends on the use of statist force to accomplish the transition to a communist society in which government then disappears. Christianity does not endorse the use of force by any person against any other person, except in self-defense or defense of one's family and friends.

I do not "need" God; I cannot escape what I see as the logical necessity of His existence.

As one who is an objectivist, a Christian, and a libertarian, I disagree with you on at least three levels. I am objectivist, but I accept Christianity as a guiding principle in my life. I am a libertarian who is guided by reason, and I don't know any libertarians who are not.

Altruism, as someone above pointed out, can be a legitimate expression of self-interest.

Neither Objectivism nor science can have anything to say about God, just as Religion can have nothing to say about science.

I think I was correctly interpreting Christian teaching. Jesus taught that all of the Law and the Prophets can be summed up in two "laws" -- the first being to love God and the second to love one's neighbor as oneself. One cannot fulfill the second of these without first loving oneself. It doesn't say, "love others more than oneself," but rather "love your neighbor as yourself." While Christ praised the man who would lay down his life for his friends, I think we all do that, under the appropriate circumstances. We honor the soldier who lays down his life for the freedom of his country; we honor the fireman who dies saving people from burning alive in their homes; we honor the police who die in the course of duty, trying to keep people safe from violent criminals; and we honor the father who dies saving his children from dangers. All these are examples of altruism that all of us, even Ayn Rand, should value. Jesus praised such sacrifice, but did not require it of anyone. It is not a duty, but a choice. Further, Christian epistemology is NOT based on faith. It is only knowledge of the divine that is based on faith, because there is no other way we can know God. Christian epistemology has generally followed the Aristotelian, which is based on reason. To say that one cannot be both a Christian and an objectivist is to misinterpret both what Rand said and what Christianity says.

There's an interesting idea.

You confuse my criticism of the delivery for a criticism of the content.

When there is time to sit down and study out a philosophy, an author has much more time to lay out their thoughts, order them, and back them up as you would in a scientific paper or a court case. Speeches don't work that way, however (which may explain why politicians are so universally short-sighted).

Consider the following examples: Paul Ryan's budget explanation and Barack Obama's "Fundamental Transformation" speech. Ryan's budget explanation was fantastically presented - if you are an accountant at a board/bored meeting. To most Americans who watched that speech, it left them unmoved. Without passion, the speech gets forgotten and the speech quickly fades into the forgotten. Obama's speech is a conglomeration of liberal thinking and nonsense. The content is shoddy and so full of holes in reason and logic it's astounding. But it accomplished its goal: it got him elected. It stirred the passions of its listeners and galvanized them to action.

Want a few examples of absolutely brilliant speeches? Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is one of them. It is one of the shortest public speeches in history (less than two pages long), yet it's simple language and structure have a depth of meaning and purpose rarely matched in any contemporary writing. Shakespeare's soliloquys (such as those by Hamlet, MacBeth, Juliet, etc.) are similarly remarkable for the same reasons. All that aside, however, there was a very good reason none of Shakespeare's speeches went on for 40+ pages: he knew his audience and the capacity of the human mind was best engaged by profound topics, simply explained.

Galt's speech may work as a philosophy text, but it fails as a "speech". That's my only point. Speeches are short, sweet, and to the point. They engage the listener and impel them to action. Effective speeches are a maximum of 10-15 minutes long. Galt's speech goes on for nearly 40 _pages_ in the book. (A basic rule of thumb is that it takes about one minute to read one page of text.) That's an awfully long time to try and hold an audience's attention (and it's one of the reasons Obama's State of the Union speeches are such a disaster). Having sat through an average of three speeches per week for more than 30 years of my life, I can tell you that the biggest impediment to success in a speech is length and Galt's speech is certainly no exception.

Yes. And why? Because the screenwriters knew that there was no way in reality even fans of the movie were going to sit through the entire original. It takes about one minute to deliver one page of text to an audience. You would have had added at least a half hour to the length of the movie and lost much of your audience in that time.

While technically correct, those residents who did not have high quantifiable production did have to be invited.

"Galt and the other producers did allow some people in who were not at the highest echelon of production, but very few."
My interpretation was Gulch residents had to take the Oath, but did not have to have high quantifiable production, although the main characters did.

Two years ago I stopped at a McDonald's. A middle-aged woman sweeping the floors went out of her way to help me. Everything she did exuded alacrity. I told her I really appreciated her help. She said she was glad, and she was doing it because she wanted to. Something bad happened in her life, she said, and now she gets joy out of doing good honest job helping people in simple ways for honest money. I got the idea she living at the top echelon of her own life, creating a little value, and not asking for anyone else's value, so many people like her would populate the Gulch.

Yes and that's the source of the proselytizing efforts of the Christians that causes me so much irritation.

Man may or may not be the most evolved life in the universe, but he is the definitely the most evolved life on this planet that we know of. Until we have further evidence or hint as to life in the rest of the universe, we can state nothing about whether we are the most evolved or not. We must live our lives with confidence in the current realm.

Personally, I think there is other life and I wonder what the knowledge will do to our society and culture when/if such is discovered.

I think if you go back through his pages of past comments that you will find serious contradictions re: the content and intent of Galt's speech. I suspect that might be the reason. I don't think it's because of any popularity.

I know that it is popular here in the Gulch to downvote CG, but here he got downvoted for paying AR a high compliment.

"if you give a man a fish you feed him one meal but if you teach a man to fish you feed him for a lifetime". is not Biblical.

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/give-...

Jesus did promise that his disciples would be fishers of men.

Indeed, a post on CS Lewis would be interesting, particularly if the post also compared Lewis' Narnia against Tolkien's Middle Earth against AR's Atlantis.

It certainly is possible that man is the most evolved species in the universe, but the premise that was accepted to get to that point is that we evolved as a series of random occurrences, with some of these occurrences thermodynamically likely and some unlikely. That is a premise that I will check until the day I die. Likewise, if we evolved after being the seed of either a god or an advanced civilization that may or may no longer exist, that would be a premise I would have to constantly check until the day I died, too.

it's what some fly fisher people do in the winter...but not as satisfying. I think we still have a website-fishingscience.com

excellent point

LOL lol

They don't even make a marshmallow peep, but they do sometimes leave behind little piles of jelly beans. :)
Happy Easter

One word comes to mind.

Hubris.

Regarding the "celebrated bastard son of the believers' excused rape of a sleeping virgin", that isn't quite the way the story is told, but your point is still a valid one. For anyone to believe this as fact would require one to simultaneously believe in a god who enjoyed a sense of irony.

During at least one of the arguments that he said that there were too many of the evil ones, the argument that I made about the diversity of the economy was one that he made. I think this is a reasonable argument against an Objectivist society having "open borders". Galt and the other producers did allow some people in who were not at the highest echelon of production, but very few. We will always have to be quite vigilant against infiltration of those who do not agree with our values.

You can't even count on our own kids growing up to agree with us, for instance, despite our teaching them our values. I think this is one of the most salient points of Robert Gore's The Golden Pinnacle in the character of one of the Durand sons.

Objectivism does have an inherent issue that makes it rather challenging, but far from impossible, from a governing standpoint. Even people who agree on almost everything are constantly running into disagreements at a much higher rate than do other governing styles.

Robbie's argument about there being too many of the evil ones is a reasonable one against an "open borders" Atlantis. His argument is a variant of Rush Limbaugh's famous "undeniable truth of life": "Ours is a world governed by the aggressive use of force." In general, other than perhaps for a couple of very brief periods in American history and probably nowhere else in world history, Rush's statement is correct. This is the primary reason why it is entirely reasonable to shrug and start a relatively exclusive Atlantis microsociety now. It is also why people came to America in the first place as well.