You don't capitalize State unless referring to one of the member republics of the United States.

I have already stated that rights don't exist; only power and action. "Rights" are a convenient fiction men use to deal with one another... but even as a useful fiction, they must come from a superior force than your fellow men, or they are not rights, but privileges.

You make a false assumption: "give up your means to bite back". The gallamimus bit back.. in futility. Nothing took away his ability to fight back.

You don't want a discussion. You want to feed your ego by belittling and demeaning the arguments and beliefs of others.

define "damned" in this context. Christianity is not monolithic; not everyone agrees what "damned" means.

William F. Wu wrote a science fiction short entitled "Three Soldiers". A WWII Wehrmacht officer, a Roman Legionnaire, and a Zulu warrior, all three of whom were on the verge of death, are brought before an alien, and committed to do personal combat with 3 members of a 2nd alien species.
Upon victory, the commanding alien demands they finish off their defeated opponents, and all three refuse. They're sent back to die their deaths, as the alien writes up his weapons testing review; it seems we weren't all that we were hoped to be as weapons in a galactic war.

In other words, as they weren't suitable to his purpose, the alien "damned" them.

Rand was no more rational than any other woman.

especially if you value yourself.

When you people stop denigrating Christians, then I'll stop arguing the issue.

You don't have to agree with me, but if you expect me to hold my tongue (and believe me, you have NEVER seen me unleash my vicious side), then neither condescend to nor insult Christian participants.

if Objectivists decide to go to war with theists, you will lose massive amounts of support.

Pot. Kettle. Black.

Now lead us down a meandering rant about how women are responsible for the creation of Christianity and the destruction of every civilization since...

Yeah, he's eating up bandwidth that could be spent listening to you preach your bs irrationalism.

My color, sex and schooling can NOT be verified. All of them can be disguised( ie, fraudulent) if I so choose, and some can simply be ambiguous.

You need to believe there's no God. I mean, what if God turned out to be a woman?

Can you prove that you exist?

How is that different from the State?

Smoke pot, get caught, watch the T Rex bite you.

Or take your shotgun to Freedom Plaza in DC and load it. Watch the T Rex curtail your right to bear arms.

Give up your means to bite back (your guns, your ability to communicate without monitoring by the T Rex). Watch the T Rex shovel you into ovens.

It does raise an interesting question. When do you get to exercise a "right"? If you can only do it with the approval of the T Rex, is it really a right? Is it a right only if you have the power to kill anyone who would infringe that right?

You first.

The universe was created or the universe just "happened".
If one accepts the first, then it was created by some intelligence. That intelligence would be "God".

Objectivists assume that the universe is rational; that it is subject to reason. Given this assumption, it follows that the creator of the universe was also rational. How could an irrational intelligence create a rational universe?

Let's not hide the discussion. Let's put it out there so that everyone may benefit.

Play on.

Why thank you. That's probably the nicest thing you've ever said about me.

BambiB- the agnostic.

Can an Objectivist be rational?

Being rational is not the same as rationalizing.

Of course I can't prove god doesn't exist. Can you prove that "Barney the Dinosaur" is NOT god?

Didn't think so.

Your turn.

Nowadays, being American doesn't mean you even have to be American.

I'm fed up with all the neurotics here blaming everything, including the evils of socialism, on Christianity, when the worst horrors ever perpetrated on man were done by self-proclaimed ATHEISTS.

Before the Terror, the French tried to do away with God; every socialist hellhole has tried to suppress religion and promote atheism. And yet it is Christianity, which has done more good, has more history-changing, civilization-advancing followers than any other belief system, especially atheism.

And, until recent decades, until the decline of America (gee, what a coincidence!), it was generally accepted among the populace that America was a Christian nation.

>> You ASSUME God does not exist.

Actually, you are absolutely wrong about this. I have stated multiple times that I don't know whether any god exists, and if one does, profess no knowledge regarding its characteristics. Further, I don't think that information is knowable, given the limitations on our species. (To even make such a determination, one would first have to define what is meant by the term "god". Have fun with that!)

What I find incredible is that people will claim to "know" something about whether god exists or not! Where's your proof?

If I tell you god exists and is, in fact, Barney the Dinosaur, who are you to tell me otherwise? Where is your proof that Barney is any more or less a "god" than Jesus of Nazareth? Or the "god" of the Jews? Or Thor? Or Zeus? Or Shiva?

Beginning with "We don't know if there is a god or not", your conclusion is akin to someone asking you to solve a mathematical expression and you randomly blurting out a number then insisting that you have the correct answer without any sort of proof whatsoever. In fact, you may be correct. But the odds are against it.

Let's try that as an experiment: What are the first 100 significant figures of π^113? … without using a computer or doing the math? Just give us the answer. Tick tock. Time's up.

Get that right under the stated conditions and maybe there IS a god. But you and I both know that the odds of you getting the correct answer is on the order of 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
(Yep. 1 in a googol.)
You could make a trillion guesses a second, and it would still take you more than 10^40 years to have a 50% chance of getting the correct answer.

Odds of you being correct? Almost zero. And so it is with your "rational assumption" about god - except for one thing. There may be no god at all, in which case, no matter what your assumption is about the nature of "god", you are wrong.

As for studying the bible, I suspect I've done as much of that as you have. Possibly more. Unless, of course, you've studied classical Greek so that you could read the New Testament in the original language? The difference is that somewhere along the line, I realized I was wasting my time, that christianity (and all other religion) is almost certainly a huge charade.

I think man creates god in his own image. He believes what he wants to believe regardless of facts. Those beliefs have no relationship to reality.

You haven't figured that out yet. In all likelihood, you never will… and if you do, you will deny it, even to yourself. It's called "cognitive dissonance". People don't give up that in which they've invested themselves, even when they KNOW they're wrong.

atheism is the opposite of theism. By definition.

RED FLAG: the wikipedia definition includes: "social justice."

Your mistake is in defining the nature of Christianity. Of course the vast majority of people who lived were never Christian; the vast majority of people who ever lived were never Objectivists, either. They never read "Atlas Shrugged" or "The Fountainhead" or "We the Living". So what?

Every child has one god before that god is replaced with another; that god is himself. The world revolves around him, his wants, his needs, and everything around him reinforces that belief. Some of us never develop another "religion", and grow up to be Objectivists.

Here is one of my mantras, may it do you good:

"God created the universe for His purpose."

Not mine; not yours... HIS. Maybe His purpose lies on another planet. Maybe He created the unverse in order to manufacture some substance He finds useful which cannot be created any other way... say... plastic.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjmtSkl53...

Or maybe He was bored one "day". Or maybe He created us to answer a philosophical question He had with Himself.

What amuses me is the one religion you choose to denigrate and persecute is the one religion that is about love, not fear. Creation is an act of love; any creator knows this, be he a painter, baker or video gamewright. What's one of the main tenets of this belief system? Love thy neighbor AS thyself; not more than, not instead of, but AS thyself. How different is this from the basic tenets of Objectivism, which preaches self-love, but expects one to trade value for value? I've heard Objectivists here speak of preserving their "integrity". What is integrity? What is its value? You snark about "bruised cheeks"... well, if you can lie and thereby gain a yacht... why not lie? Because it would hurt your integrity? What is your integrity that you would sacrifice your gain to it? What is your integrity that you would rather have a shitty, ground down in the mud life than violate it?
Oh, because integrity makes your interactions with other people better, more positive, easier?
Gee, that's what a Christian might say about following the tenets of *his* religion...