In what way do you relate to Ayn Rand's experiences
I relate to her childhood experiences since they mirror my own experiences and actions exactly.
In this interview she says that she was the smartest in her class,
- that she did not have to make much of an effort to excel in school, All she had to do was read ahead once,
- that she was bored in class and wrote novels behind her textbook.
She found writing novels challenging and I assume worthy of her intellect and much harder than reading ahead in a text book.
Like her my childhood "Novel" was ahem ... not worth mentioning. Also I wrote in such small letters that even with glasses I can''t read my writings.from that time. lol .
She says the object of a Philosophy is to understand the nature of existence. Religion too is a philosophy.
I also have tried to point out here that Religion is a philosophy and as She says it is immoral to accept it on "faith" but if arrives at through reason there is nothing wrong about it or to discuss it.
In this interview she says that she was the smartest in her class,
- that she did not have to make much of an effort to excel in school, All she had to do was read ahead once,
- that she was bored in class and wrote novels behind her textbook.
She found writing novels challenging and I assume worthy of her intellect and much harder than reading ahead in a text book.
Like her my childhood "Novel" was ahem ... not worth mentioning. Also I wrote in such small letters that even with glasses I can''t read my writings.from that time. lol .
She says the object of a Philosophy is to understand the nature of existence. Religion too is a philosophy.
I also have tried to point out here that Religion is a philosophy and as She says it is immoral to accept it on "faith" but if arrives at through reason there is nothing wrong about it or to discuss it.
Previous comments... You are currently on page 3.
Any sensible god would have Ayn Rand sitting at his# right hand,
-for promulgating the use of 'god-given' (or whatever) mind, and for explaining how ethics and actions can follow from reason.
# his, her, its, zer, hup, cur, etc..
Her warnings of the Collectivistic method can be applied 100% to today's Progressivism. Same disease, same evil morons infecting the rabble. When one listens to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez one sees the mindless automatons in government that Ayn Rand described.almost 100 years ago.
My only complaint is her disdain of religion, but I can see why: Any law that conflicts with her modus vivendi she has to eschew.
What a waste of a great mind condemned to Hell forever!.. ..
I decided to get into this discussion one more time so that I can make some points absolutely clear.
"You misinterpreted what i wrote. I wrote that one can come to those principles by RATIONAL means and NOT by faith."
From ancient Greeks to modern times it is accepted that philosophy is a rational theory, or guidance, of how individual humans can relate to and thrive in existence. There are nearly infinite number of "philosophies". In fact one could argue that each human has an own "philosophy". I put these "philosophies" in quotes because I think that most of them are not thoroughly thought through, which is to say that, when you scratch the surface off them and dig deeper, you find inconsistences and contradictions. You can look up what Ayn Rand thought about contradictions. It's better said than anything I can possibly do.
Now! One of the "philosophies" is religion when it pretends that it is a philosophy. The basic fallacy and, in consequence, disqualifying is the fact that it is god-given. In other words, those you quote are not principles. They are commands. Even Moses said so.
I don't want to lecture here. But principles are like axioms in math. Much different than commands.
I want to say one more thing, which I hope you can accept as an advice and not an ad-hominem attack. That repeated "Ignoring you." makes you look petulant and childish, which I don't believe you are or want to appear to be.
Mature humans can debate hard and end up disagreeing very deeply. But they part ways saying: "No offense! Friends as before."
Lastly, I have an impression that you felt offended when I wrote that you do not belong here. As you know, my impression is that you are trying to proselytize religion here. Let's leave that as an open question. Your future behavior will be, I hope, evidence clear enough.
Friends as before!
Sincerely,
Maritimus
A rational sense of life and understanding in principles as expressed in Ayn Rand's novels, shows thinking in essentials, not like a high volume eclectic vacuum cleaner sucking up everything in range and proclaiming great hand-ringing mysteries. Peterson has a following of his own and it's worth seeing the difference. His followers often talk in obscure generalities (such as bizarre uses of "consciousness"). When questioned, they don't know what it means either, but have an emotional attachment and just say "you have to listen to him".
Ayn Rand's philosophy, collected in Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, gives straightforward principles integrated in a hierarchy for the major issues in philosophy, with an objective approach that makes it much easier to think about problems meaningfully.
Someone interested in the psychological role of religion and of "stories" in particular can find clear explanation in Ayn Rand's The Romantic Manifesto, including the chapter "Philosophy and Sense of Life".
I think that sample will allow people to judge whether they might be interested in hearing what Peterson has to say about religion, or not. I personally find his statements and arguments fascinating. His presentation style may sound rather casual and rambling, but his underlying knowledge is based on decades of study in fields including animal behavior, neurology, child development, psychology, psychiatry, as well as treating patients as a clinical psychologist. He has a wide assortment of facts drawn from those different disciplines which support the statements he makes about religion's psychological role but, unfortunately, he hasn't compiled them all together in one concise lecture, article or book that I know of.
He reveals on this topic that he is deeply in the mentality of the German Romantics, stating at the beginning that he's a big fan of Nietze, and it shows in his emotionalist obscurity.
As to expertise on the subject of the meaning of Biblical stories, he doesn't know himself, as he states at the beginning:
"We don't understand what it means that we don't believe them now or even what it would mean if we did believe them... No matter how educated you are you aren't educated enough to discuss the psychological significance of the Biblical stories, but I'm going to do my best, partly because I want to learn more about them and one of the things I've learned is that the best way to learn about something is to talk about it, and when I'm lecturing I'm thinking, you know, I'm not trying to tell you what I know for sure to be the case because there's lots of things I do not for sure to be the case. I'm trying to make sense out of this and I have been doing this for a long time."
He goes on to demonstrate how confused his whole approach is in rambling stream of consciousness, gesticulating wildly in sincere deep consternation as he hunts through his evolving lecture trying to "learn something" -- for over 2 1/2 hours.
Here is a sample of a couple of sentences spanning about 3 mins on his main theme (no paragraph breaks because the stream doesn't pause or stop).
Ayn Rand's philosophy of reason is the antidote to this.
15:52 Our articulated systems of thought are embedded in something like a dream, and that that dream is informed in a complex way by the way we act, so, you know, we act out things we don't understand all the time. If that wasn't the case we wouldn't need a psychology or sociology or anthropology or any of that because we would be completely transparent to ourselves, and we're clearly not, so we're much more complicated than we understand, which means that the way we behave contains way more information than we know, and part of the dream that surrounds our articulated knowledge is being extracted as a consequence of us watching each other behave and telling stories about it for thousands and thousands and thousands of years extracting out patterns of behavior that characterize humanity and trying to represent them partly through imitation but also through drama and mythology and literature and art and all of that to represent what we're like so that we can understand what we're like and that process of understanding is what I see unfolding at least in part in the Biblical stories and it's, it's halting and partial and awkward and contradictory and all of that which is one of the things that makes the book so complex but I see in it the struggle of humanity to arise to rise above it's animal forbears say and become conscious of what it means to be human, and that's a very difficult thing because we don't know who we are or what we are or where we came from or any of those things, and, you know, the light life is an unbroken chain going back three and a half billion years it's an absolutely unbelievable thing every single one of your ancestors reproduced successfully for three and a half billion years it's absolutely unbelievable and we rose out of the dirt and the muck and here we are conscious but not knowing and we're tying to figure out who we are and a story that we've been telling, or a set of stories we've been telling for three thousand years seems to me to have something to offer, and so when I look at the stories in the Bible I do it in some sense with a beginner's mind, it's the mystery of this book, how the hell it was made, why it was made, why we preserved it, how it happened to motivate an entire culture for two thousand years and to transform the world, like what's going on, how did that happen. It's by no means obvious and one of the things that bothers me about casual critics of religion is that they don't the phenomena seriously and it's a serious phenomena I mean not least because people have the capacity for religious experience and no one knows why that is I mean you can induce it reliably in all sorts of different ways. You can do it with brain stimulation. You can certainly do it with drugs there's especially the psychedelic variety they produce intimations of the divine extraordinarily regularly people have been using drugs like that god only knows how long, 50,000 years maybe more than that to produce some sort of intimate union with the divine it's like we don't understand any of that when we just discovered the psychedelics in the late 60s. It shocked everybody so badly that they were made instantly made illegal and banned in terms of research for like fifty years and it's no wonder because who the hell expected that. Nobody. 19:10
If you do not understand why the content and method of the moral code you are proselytizing here are in fundamental conflict with the purpose of this forum, read "The Objectivist Ethics" and "Causality Versus Duty". The rejection of your proselytizing the 10 commandments is not "triggered" or "closed mindedness".
I am once again ignoring you.and will do so in the future. I am not the only one here that is already doing so.
The ten commandments are religious duties, not based on reason. Trying to rationalize them is not "reason". The difference between both their content and that approach versus an objective ethics is fundamental, not "knee-jerk", not "biased", and not "rant".
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