Some social conservatives stumbled upon a few Ayn Rand interviews, and they’re shocked to learn that Ayn thought religion in general, and Christianity in particular, is horseshit. In fact, she called Christianity “the best kindergarten of communism possible”.
This makes Young Conor’s head hurt, so he falls back on the oldest trope in the book: Some of his best friends are good Christians and they like Atlas Shrugged. So what? Some of my best friends are good people and philosophically incoherent, too. And, more importantly, he says this:
Accordingly, I find no contradiction in Atlas Shrugged and the Bible both sitting on my shelf. Though they contradict one another, I take neither as infallible and I’ve gleaned moral truth from both. I am sure that makes orthodox Christians and Objectivists alike very uncomfortable. But it also highlights something that those two groups have in common: a conviction that certain texts and belief systems must either be embraced wholeheartedly or rejected – that any position in between is heretical or incoherent.
This is bullshit on stilts. While it’s absolutely true that most novels contain complex characters from whom one can gain insights into human nature and morality, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead are not like most novels. They are carefully constructed polemics with characters and situations engineered to make it clear that rational self-interest is the one, true foundation for the good society. All the heroes in Atlas Shrugged, for example, are materialists and rationalists, the teachings of Jesus are never mentioned, religion in general is only mentioned to be deried, and the actions of its heroes are based almost entirely on love of self rather than love for fellow men. I can see little or nothing that a self-professed Christian can glean from this book that isn’t in conflict with Christianity as it is generally understood. That’s why Christians have every right to question what Paul Ryan and Rand Paul actually believe from the Bible, since they also profess admiration for Atlas Shrugged.
Read on for a few choice Rand quotes.
From Atlas Shrugged:
People with pleading eyes and desperate faces crowded into tents where evangelists cried in triumphant gloating that man was unable to cope with nature, that his science was a fraud, that his mind was a failure, that he was reaping punishment for the sin of pride, for his confidence in his own intellect-and that only faith in the power of mystic secrets could protect him from the fissure of a rail or from the blowout of the last tire on his last truck. Love was the key to the mystic secrets, they cried, love and selfless sacrifice to the needs of others.
This is from Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged:
The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man’s power to conceive- a definition that invalidates man’s consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. Man’s mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God. Man’s standard of value, say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of God, whose standards are beyond man’s power of comprehension and must be accepted on faith. The purpose of man’s life is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.
And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: ‘I.’
El Cid
Neither the plots nor characters are carefully engineered. They are the most simplistic, boring, silly cardboard silhouettes onto which a variety of cliches and tirades are projected.
It’s this blunt stupidity and simplistic party-line hack writing which attracts its devoted followers.
Because, remember, they’re much more sophisticated than all those dupes who fell for those awfully condescending and overly simplistic writings from those devotedly soshullist or Communist or too overly fellow traveling. Like The Grapes of Wrath or The Jungle.
kdaug
The blowback commeth…
wonkie
Jesus was acting in ratioal self iterest whe he got crucified because he wanted to be famous after he died. It had nothing to do with saving mankind, of course.
Svensker
Rand didn’t just hate Christianity, she hated religion. She wrote explicitly about that in one of her non-fic books (don’t remember which one now). I was an “objectivist” for a few years in high school.
Comrade Javamanphil
They made Jesus white. I hardly see how it is an impediment that they now must recast him as an objectivist.
Hillary Rettig
Ayn Rand once wrote that she had considered having a priest in Atlas Shrugged who saw the error of his ways and went Galt, but then decided against it because she felt that religion even in the hands of the best people was a total waste.
Alex S.
Well, Conor, both Christianity and objectivism are meant to be holistic belief systems and you can’t choose what you want to believe and what not, because every deviation from the gospel makes the whole belief system collapse.
Deathstar
Conor says he has gleaned ‘moral truth’ from Atlas Shrugged but you’ll notice he doesn’t actually cite any. This is because Objectivism is founded on the premise that self-interest is the only rational basis for morality and that self-sacrifice is explicitly immoral. You don’t need to be a theologian to see that these precepts are antithetical to Christianity.
What morality is there in Randism? The only thing I can think of is the perceived “fairness” in an absolute meritocracy. Glibertarians of course love this, but a thoughtful lad like Conor can’t quite scare up enough adjectives to defend it as a moral truth.
Tyro
Can’t Conor just up-front say, “well, I don’t really believe Christianity, so I don’t see why I should be concerned with Rand’s hostility to it?” It’s just Republican politicians who have to maintain the pretense of being practicing Christians for political purposes for whom this is an issue.
More hilarious in Conor’s essay, however, is the firefighter who identifies with Hank Reardon.
Chris
That both summarizes Ayn Rand theory, and why it’s incompatible with Christianity and religion.
Virtually every religion has as a starting point the acceptance that there’s something more important than you in the universe, and building off of that, that there are moral codes more important than “if it feels good, do it.” That’s before you even get into “how should we treat our fellow men,” “how does God want us to live,” or any of that stuff. If you don’t recognize a higher power than yourself or a higher law than your own ego, you fail the religion test pretty much right out the door.
GregB
Leave Ayn Rand alone and stop it with these gotcha kwestchins.
RSA
Next, young Conor explains how conservatives and objectivists should just consider the good parts of Das Kapital, rather than mindlessly rejecting all ideas associated with Karl Marx.
alwhite
My guess is if it comes down to the church of Jesus Christ or the Church of John Galt they will come down on the side of Galt and his apostles – St. Ronnie of Reagan, St. Ronnie of Texas, St. Ayn of the flatline, St. Rand of Machine Gun . . .
Mudge
With few exceptions, the ideological right makes no effort to reconcile inconsistancies, because they don’t recognize them. They will say Rand’s quotes are “out of context” then, if able, incoherently concoct some composite philosophy using the entirety of “Atlas Shrugged” that proves she was actually a good Christian. Then they will believe it.
bleh
Let’s also remember that many self-professed “Christians” these days hardly live by anything resembling the teachings of Jesus. Many — especially the loudest — are selfish, greedy, bigoted, and angry. For them, Christianity is a club of the elect, and anyone not in the club is subhuman.
dricey
These Randian “Christians” have read and internalized Rand, but I promise you that they have read (if they’ve read at all) and internalized only the most carefully selected parts of the Bible, and particularly of the teachings of Jesus. I’ve led a weekly historical-critical Bible study for the last six years, and what leaps out from the texts, even for those originally “Bible-believing” Christians, is that if you want a Jesus who’s at all Rand-friendly, you must confine your reading of the Gospels to John, because in the Synoptics, Jesus NEVER says that eternal life flows from mere belief in him, but only from deeds, even if those deeds are as broad as love of God and love of neighbor, and Jesus is very condemning of wealth. In John, by contrast, Jesus NEVER raises the moral issue of wealth, and the poor are mentioned only three times, twice because Judas was said to be stealing money from the common purse on the pretext of giving it to the poor. And in John, Jesus NEVER says that deeds confer eternal life, that only belief in him does so. Furthermore, in the Synoptics, and most pointedly in Luke, Jesus insists on self-sacrificing love, even of enemies, while in John, Jesus commands love only of fellow Christians and asks “What greater love is there than to sacrifice your life for your friends?”
Is it any wonder that this GOP caricature of Christianity that has swept the country, and perverted its religion, focuses all but solely on John and acknowledges the Synoptics only for Christmas pageant material?
NonyNony
Look it all becomes very clear once you realize that Randian Objectivism is perfectly compatible with the The Gospel of Supply-Side Jesus.
Rand probably still would have hated him, but she would have recognized a kindred spirit.
greennotGreen
I think you’re forgetting the most important tenet of Christianity as practiced by far too many people these days: Jesus died on the cross so certain special people who call themselves “Christians” could receive get-out-of-jail-free cards. Then they could be selfish pricks all week long, and present their cards Sunday morning. Rinse, repeat. Objectivism and Christianity work fine when employed sequentially.
"Fair and Balanced" Dave
I think there are strong similarities between Randism and the sort of vindictive religious fundamentalism exemplified by works such as the “Left Behind” series. LaHaye and Rand both wrote books that are essentially “revenge porn” striking back at those they consider their inferiors.
Chris
@bleh:
@dricey:
Guys, please accept the following blog post courtesy of a Sadly, No! thread from a few days ago: http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/118585.html. Refreshing take on it to say the least, methinks.
Comrade Dread
Human beings are masters at holding two incompatible beliefs to both be true at the same time.
You simply ignore the inconvenient parts of the Bible or you interpret them in such a way that they reinforce your political beliefs.
That way, Jesus can be both a self-sacrificing Savior and a gun enthusiast capitalist who would tell the poor to get bent (or a revolutionary communist who wouldn’t blink at murdering political opponents.)
Mark S.
There aren’t really many philosophies as antithetical to Christianity as Objectivism. While many philosophers (Aristotle, Nietzsche) are aristocratic and more or less indifferent to poor, Objectivism actively hates the poor and sees them as parasites.
Triassic Sands
Rand’s novels: Cardboard characters for a cardboard philosophy. Life in a one dimensional world. Boring and pointless.
Chris
@Comrade Dread:
Yep, and the reason Ayn Rand never became the patron saint of the GOP is because she and her followers were incapable of accepting or preaching more than One True Belief.
Instead, that medal went to William F. Buckley and his ilk, people who preached the same gospel as Ayn Rand, but wrapped it up in the much more comfortable language of the cross, the flag, and apple pie.
(Hell, it’s bizarre enough that we live in a country where Christianity and nationalism are considered to go hand in hand).
andy
In the end, the biggest, loudest Christians will have no issue whatever with Rand or her modern disciples because they are united in their worship of the Holy Dollar Sign. It’s the Prosperity Gospel they’re preaching in the suburban megachurches, after all.
Woodrow/asim Jarvis Hill
As others have alluded to, it’s easy to hold two ideas in your head at once, and call them the same. Humans have been ignoring what the Bible (among many other works of religious import) says for centuries, why stop now?
I mean, Jesus spent his whole life poor. Hell, the New Testament even said “the love of money is the root of all evil,” and they evade it! Just as they evoke the persecution of the early Christians in modern-day America, yet avoid the fact that those early Christians were also downright Communistic in their day-to-day lives.
Amazing. Simply amazing.
Tokyokie
All GOPers have to do is take the you’re-going-to-hell-because-you-don’t-think-the-way-I-do bits from the New Testament and embrace the fuck-you-I’ve-got-mine perspective of Rand, and it meshes together perfectly.
jwest
There seems to be a general belief here that evangelicals are automatically republican.
You know this not the case, don’t you?
Feudalism Now!
No offense, but that Jesus character seems pretty darn soshulist. At some point, some liberal yuro-peein twisted the bible to meet their heathen papist agenda to destroy true Christianity. Jesus ‘El Savior’ Christ rode velociraptor ‘Jesus ponies’ to destroy Satan’s legions. He broke 665 crosses on his manly back before taking a 3 day nap to take the fight straight to the devil in his pit and bring capitalism to all the chosen. Not what the lamestream wants you to believe about Mr. Jesus H. Christ is it?
The majority of conservative Christians view of Christianity is no less skewed than juggling the Gospel of Galt and the New Testament. The Book of Revelations is more important than all of the Gospels. Everyday is viewed as the day before the end of the world, so forethought and planning are a wasted exercise.
Joseph Nobles
Ayn Rand is also fully compatible with the Gospel of Health and Wealth. They’ll know you are Christian by your fat bank account and your clean bill of health.
RNoman
The adherents of the Christian Right follow a very, mmm, peculiar methodology of Christian Living. No camel through the needle’s eye for these. Material rewards are evidence of Christian Virtue. Living a good Christian life is “The Secret”. Putting Jesus in your heart is to Visualize Success. Being a Good Christian is to be a Superman, a Heroic Achiever. Jesus For The Win!
Does that make the two bullshits mix a little better now?
shecky
This may be a revelation to many conservatives, simply because what they know of Rand came from the mouths of Beck and Limbaugh.
I’m sure the Rand and Jesus can be integrated in one way or another. But that would take the effort to crack open a book or two. It’s not the first time seemingly incongruent philosophy and religion found a home together. Teabaggers simply need to wait for someone to do the heavy lifting for them.
shortstop
@Comrade Javamanphil: That made me laugh.
This is where magical thinking really has to flex its muscles. They want the comforting, dominant tribalism of being Christian and they want the cash perks of being totally self-focused (putting aside for a moment that they make political choices that don’t actually result in increased $ for them). And they’re going to make those two philosophies fit together as smoothly as the president’s Islamic Marxism go together, because shut up.
PurpleGirl
@Chris: Thanks for the link to The Infamous Brad. I began reading the entry and will have to return to it later (as I really should be doing other stuff right now).
Do you read Slactivist? Fred has been deconstructing The Left Behind series for a few years now and is only into the second book. He also writes on Christianity in general. I don’t agree with every thing he says but he is thought provoking.
The current url for Slactivist since he joined Patheos
http://www.patheos.com/community/slacktivist/
ETA: I come from a Roman Catholic background and spent ten years in a Lutheran congregation. I currently do not consider myself Christian but it is the faith tradition I relate to best. My current belief system is close to Native American but I’m NA so I won’t lay claim to the whole of the beliefs.
Ghanima Atreides
why is this a surprise for you?
Rand was also a sexual libertine, and Conor fails to mention that.
The essence of the GOP is jesuses and pen1ses anymore.
Libertarians are all the way into the clown car at this point.
Speaking of which, have you seen the latest gem from the LoOG?
We Are All Conferate Soldiers Now
C’mon mistermix. Why isnt the LoOG in the mock column yet?
Kirbster
“Bullshit on stilts.” Great phrase. Can I steal it?
Just Some Fuckhead
A defense of Christian Randianism based on the premise that the Bible is fallible? Who exactly is Conor targeting with this pleasing and absolving heresy?
WereBear
@Chris: That is an extraordinary story I do not doubt in the slightest.
It explains so much!
Chris
@PurpleGirl:
Afraid not. This blog and Sadly, No! are among the few blogs I read regularly, I hadn’t even heard of The Infamous Brad until that S, N! post the other day.
Thanks for the link – moving to it now.
Tuttle
@dricey: They don’t even really focus on John so much as Romans. I’ve listened to many a radio or TV preacher prattle on for hours quoting nothing but the works of Paul.
Catholicism represents the victory of Peter’s theology over Paul’s.
Protestantism represents the victory of Paul’s theology over Peter’s.
Fundamentalism represents the victory of Paul’s theology over Jesus’.
jrg
What gets me is that Republicans didn’t see any problem with this Randian bullshit until Medicare was threatened. Then they flip the fuck out.
So, basically, it takes threatening their self interest to object to Objectivism (which says they should only be concerned with their self interest)… After spending years screwing over other people. Morons.
This supports my hypothesis that people who base their judgment of “morality” on belief in talking snakes do so because they are far too stupid to understand “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
PurpleGirl
@PurpleGirl: Okay, let’s try this again:
My current belief system is closer to Native American but I’m NOT NA so I won’t lay claim to the whole of the beliefs.
Ghanima Atreides
@shortstop: it is part of the selective memetic fitness of xianity. Being granted dominion over the earth means that rapacious exploitation of the earth’s out-tribe populations and resources is pre-approved.
That is how a minority of anglosaxon xians acquired a disproportionate share of the worlds resources.
And think about the proselytization mandate.
It goes hand-in-glove with colonialism.
Like this…..O ignorant brown/black/yellow people, we xians are going to rape you, enslave you, steal your stuff, and even kill you (unless you convert), but its GOOD for you because we are saving your heathen souls for Jeebus even if you are dead.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Tuttle:
I dunno. I think Catholicism represents James’ victory over Paul. Jews For Jesus represents Peter’s victory over James.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ghanima Atreides:
Okay, why is an analysis of an interview with a southern historian objectionable?
sneezy
This is the kind of thing that makes it impossible for me to take young Conor seriously.
mario
seriously,
how many wingnuts do you think have actually plowed through a 1000+ page book?
moonbat
@Tuttle: Amen. If there is a spoiler in the New Testament it is Paul. What a misogynistic asshole.
PurpleGirl
@mario: I assume that there was one copy of Atlas Shrugged with all the sex scenes highlighted in yellow that got passed around the high school and college-age boys reading it.
Yevgraf (fka Michael)
@El Cid:
Are you talking about the Bible, or Atlas Shrugged? Because that applies to each…
Joey Giraud
The right-wing coalition of Christians and Capitalists have been ripe for fracturing for 20 years. Good to see *someone* has crafted a hammer for the purpose.
Geeno
I think when evangelicals are talked about here, people think of the big evangelical political organizations which are universally Republican. It is a kind of laziness, but those are the evangelicals that are a concern here. Those other evangelicals are nice and all, but they aren’t loud enough on their own to help or hurt on a political level a great deal.
gnomedad
The still showing on the YouTube video embed looks like Otto the Autopilot.
shortstop
@mario: Good point. Prolly more of us have finished it than they have–at least those of us who were sent to colleges associated with conservative “think tanks” by well-meaning Republican parents who failed to foresee the resultant political rebellion on the part of their kids and later followed said kids joyfully into the Democratic Party during the reign of George II. Whew, I should have dropped a trail of breadcrumbs on my way into that sentence.
kth
Conor’s take is true if you substitute an author who holds a self-centered worldview, but is a true artist and/or philosopher: Byron, Stendhal, Nietzsche. Anyone who regards Rand as a serious author cannot have read those authors.
MomSense
One of the big problems with the Christian bible for Republicans, is that it advocates socialism. It’s pretty clear in Acts that the expectation for followers of Jesus is that they are to bring everything they have to the disciples so that these things can be distributed to each according to his need.
If you have been paying attention to the Republicans for the last 30 years or so, their real religion is supply side let them eat cake-onomics. They try to reconcile this with their Christianism with evangelicals like Osteen who preach the “prosperity gospel”. It is a really ruthless gospel(and not biblically supported!) if you consider the flipside of its wealth and happiness will come to those who follow Jesus tenet. The flipside is that people who are suffering must have forsaken God, in other words they deserve it. We saw this loud and clear in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina. We see it in the careless indifference to people without adequate health and dental care. We see it in the refusal to extend unemployment benefits, attempts to repeal of child labor laws, refusal to raise minimum wage, etc.
Maybe this conversation will illuminate just how dishonest and incompatible Republican ideology is with their supposed Christian values.
Yevgraf (fka Michael)
@Deathstar:
Ah,but in ‘Murkan Pharisaical fundamentalist Xtianity, you can synchronize the two, because the most important parts of the Bible are the parts where Angry Sky Daddy smites sinners. It sent Jesus down to Earth to tell Its claymation playthings to believe in It, lest It gets mad and smooshes them.
Chris
@PurpleGirl:
Huh! Somewhat similar story here – started out Roman Catholic, took a look at evangelical Protestantism, went back to the Catholics when the fundies turned out to by fucking nuts, and then slowly drifted into apathy, where I am now.
No NA beliefs, though. I’m just at the point of “even if there is a God, there’d be no way to tell which religion’s right about him, or if any of them are right about him, and if not, what ‘right about him’ would look like.” IOW, it’s I just don’t think about it much anymore. Still remember quite a bit, though.
vtr
Ryan’s use of the word “fantastic” far more apt than he meant it to be, according to my dictionary.
Chris
@jrg:
“The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on them. In fact, their lack of embarrassment when it comes to collecting government largesse is key to understanding what this movement is all about.”
– Matt Taibbi, from the Rolling Stone article
@Geeno:
It’s unfair to a good many evangelicals, beginning with Jimmy Carter, but the fact is that it remains the rock-solid religious base of the GOP. Mainline Protestant churches are pretty liberal at this point. The Catholic population breaks even, following the national vote in every election of the last thirty years. The evangelicals, though, lean solidly Republican. (That’s getting more tenuous as time goes by, though).
cat48
Linda Featheringill
Yes, I’m a little late to the conversation.
I think the video is very good on multiple levels. I want to try to find a way to contact the group [American Values or something] and send them an email or something. Since the video is just trying to tell a truth, I think it would be rude of me to lie to them. I think I’ll just try to encourage them to spread this video around a lot and repeat it a lot. I won’t tell them what I think they can do with their values.
:-)
Working now. Maybe at lunch.
kindness
I would have liked to have voiced my opinion to young Conner but in the Atlantic’s wisdom, because of previous opinions I have raised in Megan McArdle’s posts, I am not allowed to voice my thoughts there any longer.
That makes the baby Jesus cry.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Yevgraf (fka Michael):
Gee, Davey, our God is an awesome God..
jimmiraybob
Has anybody asked the brave and serious Ryan, in front of a camera, which of his constituents he considers to be looters, moochers and/or parasites? You can’t have Ayn World without the looters, moochers and/or parasites. I’d be interested in his answer.
Kathy in St. Louis
I read “Atlas Shrugged” when I was 19 and decided that if people were this self-absorbed and uncaring, I might as well pack it in. Seems odd to me that anyone who claims to want to serve his fellow human beings by representing them in Congress would have anything but contempt for the characters that Rand created as heroes.
Now is those same representatives had sought the job strictly for their own self interest and aggrandizement…..
Paul Ryan is a fraud.
Davis X. Machina
There may or not be atheists in foxholes, but if there are Objectivists in Jesuit schools, they r doin it rong.
Teach us, good Lord,
to serve you as you deserve,
to give and not to count the cost,
to fight and not to heed the wounds,
to toil and not to seek for rest,
to labor and not to ask for any reward,
save that of knowing that we do your will.
Hear that often enough — I heard it at least weekly for years — and there’s no telling what you get — sometimes it’s Fidel Castro, some days it’s Pat Buchanan, some days it’s Michael Harrington(El Colegio de Bélen, Gonzaga High, St. Louis University High.)
Ghanima Atreides
@Omnes Omnibus: i lieked this part.
The North started it and its the womens fault.
Two conservative core memes.
The vomitorium for libertarian failmemes links confederate apologist Shelby Foote and half the LoOGies agree with him in the comments.
Did you read the comments?
Ask Dennis G what he thinks of the comments.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ghanima Atreides: Okay, but that was Foote’s opinion, not that of the LOOGie. Commenters are, of course, commenters.
Judas Escargot
Is anyone else as amused as I am by the choice of verb wrt “moral truth”?
Whether you use the modern meaning of casually gathering bits of information (Cliff-Notes style), or the older meaning of cleaning up bits of crop leftover after the reapers have come and gone at Harvest time… it’s a very odd (and somewhat revealing) choice of word.
It’s pretentious enough in the postmodern age to presume that some disembodied, context-free, absolute “moral truth” exists in the first place (IMO, educated people should know better by now). But acting like that “moral truth” is something you’ll just pick up here and there, like the French language or taco recipes, indicates a certain… well, shallowness of thought.
dricey
@Tuttle: The most overlooked passage in Romans is in chapter 2, verses 6 and following, in which Paul says that both Jew and Greek will be judged for eternal life based on their ‘erga’, a Greek plural that can be translated either as ‘works’ or ‘deeds’. I’ve never heard a preacher of any stripe address that passage, and even in standard one-volume Bible commentaries it’s passed over. Yet it’s every bit as much a part of “The Bible” as the overworked discussion that follows in Romans of being made righteous (‘justified’) by faith, not by erga, and as Romans 10, where Paul says that if you confess Jesus as Lord with your lips and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead you will have eternal life.
Could it be that Paul is inconsistent? But then that would mean that a human being wrote (or dictated) Romans, not the Holy Spirit. Well, duh.
Like I said, mine is a historical-critical Bible study, but over time it changes the minds of those who stick with it.
Linda Featheringill
I did find an email address to make a comment about the video:
[email protected]
I sent an email, identifying the video, saying how good it was, encouraging them to saturate the airways with it, and mentioning that I live in NE Ohio and have not yet seen it on my local TV.
Hey, it can’t hurt.
John Weiss
Ayn Rand! I read Atlas Shrugged when I was young and really dumb and concluded that it was complete, utter bullshit. IMHO, having struggled to re-read it (fail!) I’ve a lower opinion of it today: it’s badly written as well.
Linda Featheringill
BTW, mistermix, the title of this post is very appropriate. It does make me sad, though, because the original song is sweet and very idealistic. I am a sucker for idealism.
[They will know we are Christians by our love.]
:-(
MattR
@Omnes Omnibus: More to the point it was Foote’s opinion of how a poor, misinformed, undereducated peasant would react.
Deathstar
@Yevgraf (fka Michael):
‘Claymation playthings.’ Good one.
Nutella
@jimmiraybob:
The biggest looter, moocher, and parasite in Ryan’s district is Ryan. Other than a short stint as a Wienermobile driver for Oscar Meyer while he was in college, he hasn’t done any work at all in the private sector.
He apparently did get some money from the construction company his great-grandaddy founded but that’s more of him mooching from the productive people.
He really is the poster boy for the “keep the government out of my MediCare” crowd. All of them want to cut all government spending going to anyone except themselves.
srv
I saw a guy following a pro-life protest carrying a poster with “Abortion is a moral right – Ayn Rand”
Folks did NOT like that.
The Other Chuck
Jeebuz lets you hate the gays. Rand lets you hate the poor. How could Republicans fail to embrace both?
The Other Chuck
@Ghanima Atreides:
I see m_c found a new name.
jim filyaw
i’ll gladly agree with madam rand this far, that the god pat robertson and the southern baptist convention preach is pure horseshit. i’ll also submit that the ryans and pauls of this world (such as the editorial staff of the wall street journal) are as mystically minded as any of us who still believe in a creator. instead of the god imagined in the bible, they’ve substituted the great and wonderful free market god whose pleasure they’ve convinced themselves they have earned. any lingering pretensions of fidelity to the judeo-christian myth is nothing more than a smoke screen to confuse the dimwits as needed.
MomSense
@dricey
Then you’ve never heard my Dad preach! I have actually heard many Unitarian Universalist preachers focus on exactly this–the importance of deeds as being the true measure of a person’s faith. But then we are those heretical, now commie hippies who rejected the trinity so what do we know.
AAA Bonds
It’s quite possible for Li’l Conor to see no contradiction here, because he doesn’t see any contradiction between capitalism and Christianity.
The entire United States is based on that contradiction.
AAA Bonds
@dricey:
Well, they don’t have “preachers”, but the Catholics use Romans 2 all the time.
To be my standard dick self, the faith/deeds issue was confronted by the Old Churches over a thousand years ago and IMO no one has really come up with anything better than they did.
mpbruss
Re: Faith and works: “Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system. It means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth, the love of God taught as the Christian ‘conception’ of God. An intellectual assent to that idea is held to be of itself sufficient to secure remission of sins. The Church which holds the correct doctrine of grace has, it is supposed, ipso facto a part in that grace. In such a Church the world finds a cheap covering for its sins; no contrition is required, still less any real desire to be delivered from sin. Cheap grace therefore amounts to a denial of the living Word of God, in fact, a denial of the Incarnation of the Word of God.” –Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“Faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.” –James 2:17
Ghanima Atreides
@Omnes Omnibus: like i said, why link it? its mainstreaming a position that i can argue MOST IF NOT ALL libertarians share.
To John’s homeslice EDK, this is another REASONABLE and UNDERSTANDABLE position.
EDK and the libertarian assclown posse are LEGITIMIZING and POPULARIZING Footes evil, bad, and crazipants opinions by giving them airtime.
The meme that libertarians push is that ending slavery was not the REAL reason that the Conferacy seceeded.
This is just more reacharound.
Jay in Oregon
@srv:
That’s beautiful. :) I’ll have to keep it mind.
@The Other Chuck:
m_c has been using that name for a while now.
HyperIon
So…who exactly are these orthodox Christians that CF speaks of? Fundies? Non-unitarians? Catholics who do not practice birth control? Daniel Larison?
Ghanima Atreides
@AAA Bonds: the doctrine of original sin is the REASON that christ had to die on the cross to save mankind.
It originated in the war on the gnostic heretics long after jesus’ death, and was made up out of whole cloth IMHO. salvation by faith evolved as part of original sin doctrine.
As you can imagine, my investigations into gnostic heresy did not go over well at Immaculate Conception.
I personally think original sin was made up to keep the clergy’s boot on the congregants necks.
Muslims don’t believe in original sin. All children are born sinless and innocent, (ie muslim), and then should follow their parents faith until they are old enough to chose a faith for themselves.
Shoemaker-Levy 9
@AAA Bonds:
And it’s Exhibit A in mankind’s neverending quest to make everything more difficult than it really is.
The Bible demands “works” of its believers, it also describes several episodes of people being “saved” after having done nothing more than profess faith. To an outside observer this is commonly known as a “contradiction”, and hardly surprising when you consider that the Bible was written by many different people with many different agendas. Trying to resolve the faith/works problem is a waste of time in light of the latter point.
Duckest Fuckingway: Ask not for whom the Duck Fucks. . .
Jesus Fucking Christ on Ken Burns’ Moon Bounce, the Late Shelby Foote(TM) has only been making that argument for what, three or four decades now?
I mean, I may disagree with where he takes his thesis, but it is neither surprising or new.
Also my dear ‘tako-chin, when you go all-caps it just makes you look even MORE insane than usual.
Ghanima Atreides
@Duckest Fuckingway: Ask not for whom the Duck Fucks. . .:
so why give it airtime? why LEGITIMIZE it by “discussing” it?
Because it endorses several libertarian positions that you can see see showcased in the LoOG commentariat.
1. lets blame teh wymmens. its those sneaky uncontrolled vaginas that make our side do bad things.
2. The civil war was not “really” about freeing the slaves but about “states” rights.
3. The North INVADED the South. the Confederates were just protecting their homes and families.
And again, my question of the month. If Sully is in the mock column, why the hell isn’t the LoOG?
Omnes Omnibus
@Ghanima Atreides: As a lawyer, if I am going to refute the argument of the other side, I need to understand the argument. By understand it, I mean know it and the thinking behind it so well that I could make the argument myself. Only when I can do that can I be sure that I will be able to counter all aspects of it. Understanding someone’s position does not mean that one agrees with it. Being able to comprehend Foote’s take on how a poor Southerner would have regarded the Civil War can provide insight into how that Southerner’s spiritual descendants view the world today.
Forsetti
A Christian that thinks Any Rand’s views are good ideas is like being a Jew that denies the Holocaust or a Muslim that owns a Heavenly Ham.
Ghanima Atreides
@Omnes Omnibus: yes EXACTLY like “understanding” islamophobia, birtherism, and fetus=slave calumny. Saying some eumeme is UNDERSTANDABLE legitimizes it, mainstreams it.
How about saying this is NOT UNDERSTANDABLE. This _________ (fill in libertarian position) is WRONG, BAD, EVIL and NOT UNDERSTANDABLE.
This is my long time argument with EDK.
JUST TELL THE BASE THAT IS A WRONG STUPID BAD EVIL IDEA.
You are NOT going to persuade them because of backfire effect, factblocking, and tribalism.
So fuck off with your lawerly argumentation.
Libertarians KNOW BETTER. They are pandering to the conservative base to get power for their horrible anti-empirical first culture ideology.
Bubblegum Tate
@dricey:
Thanks for this–really a tremendous comment.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ghanima Atreides: Well, shit, I guess you can’t say it is not understandable because it can be understood. You have to realize that their viewpoint is based on certain premises with which many of us simply do not agree. That does not mean it can’t be understood. Also, rejecting something without understanding it is akin to praising a fugitive and cloistered virtue, which, per Milton, one should not do.
Ghanima Atreides
@Omnes Omnibus: well agree the conservative base is unpersuadable and we will call it a draw.
your lawerly argument was you needed to understand to counter their argument, ie persuade them.
it can’t be done.
So then the discussion of Foote’s confederate apologia at the LoOG devolves to the stardard chatroulette style masturbatory circle jerk, like most libertarian “discussions”.
Now you must pay the toll.
Why is Sully in the mock column and not the LoOG?
Ghanima Atreides
ok fine i give up.
still moderated.
@Omnes Omnibus: well just agree the conservative base is unpersuadable and we will call it a draw.
your lawerly argument was you needed to understand to counter their argument, ie persuade them.
it can’t be done.
I understand perfectly why the conservative base believes vile evil wrong and stupid things. And you do too. Its so libertarians can get power for their failed anti-empirical first culture ideology by allying themselves with the illiberal social conservatives.
Now pay the toll to the troll under the bridge.
Why is Sully in the mock column but not the LoOG?
Matt
There’s only an incongruity here if one takes at face value that the self-proclaimed “Christians” are actually worshipping Jesus. A quick dig into things like the “prosperity gospel” makes it pretty clear that, if one accepts the theology at face value (a big IF), the modern “conservative Christian” is in fact worshipping one of the “false prophets” from Revelation. Some might even label it as the OT “Mammon”, for instance.
Again, this is interpreting the observed actions *solely* through the “believers'” own book; the question of whether the whole “invisible man in the sky” routine is anything more than a collective delusion is a whole different question…
El Cid
@Yevgraf (fka Michael):
You need to read more of the Old Testament. There’s some weird, complex, contradictory, funny, and overwhelmingly creepy characters in there.
I’ve read through chunks of the O/T, in part to see how it struck me when I looked at it through the rough historical context, and as characters, including the God character.
For example, with regard to Cain & Abel, God really didn’t like fixed agriculture at all; if you weren’t about pastoralism and livestock, your offerings to him were an insult.
Cain gave God the fruits of his agricultural labors and of his food-producing fields in the burnt offering the Big Guy demanded for some reason, whereas Abel kept livestock and slaughtered an animal whose castoff parts and fats to burn.
God loved Abel’s pastoralist animal offerings, and insulted Cain’s mere plant-based ones.
Weird, except you had the encounters — during and especially before these passages are guessed to have been drawn together and written down — between peoples who were migratory pastoralists (and thus needing to follow good grazing lands and avoid too many predators) and agriculturalists settling in a fixed area and maintaining exclusive access to those lands.
It’s blindingly obvious as you’re reading the story as literature and mythology, like the Greek myths. Which it is, but with more history, or stuff they wanted the listeners / readers around them to think was actually their history.
Though I should have guessed (but didn’t think about it too much more) that there would be earlier Sumerian tales which were more clear about the lifestyle conflict.
I would definitely not have simply suspected that it also ties back into the elimination of other and particularly female gods; so that early on, the O/T God is clearly the only one, he’s the macho male god of herders, and all those female gods of fertility and agriculture had to be got rid of. So just associate them with a figure who failed the one true male macho herding god, and became a bitter evil figure (the view which would win out) to show how those slag goddesses were the bad old days.
Pretty clear when the Sumerian myth most analogous portrays the shepherd god as a vengeful, jealous prick who sees the farmer’s work as pathetic and not worthy of the maiden he wants for his bride. He keeps it up despite all the entreaties of peace and comity from the farmer, and so then the farmer basically keeps giving the already rich shepherd god stuff until he gives the maiden, too, because the farmer just thought all should be together.
This is pretty much the petty, jealous prick who fucks with Cain.
There wasn’t a single page of any of that Rand crap which had anything of even the slightest interest to me with any angle whatsoever.
Michael R. Brown
What a shame this fake argument is raging like wildfire. Acknowledging Rand’s proven track record of economic and political wisdom – which we can see all around us, as she predicted a great deal of it, down to specific types of mechanism – does not mean a Christian or anyone else agrees with the totality of her thought. It’s also very silly to maintain that the Christian commitment to caring for the poor somehow automatically means Progressive politics or anything to do with government at all. Jesus was not pro-State – note who killed him. The Christian injunction is that *we* help the poor – a very libertarian and individualistic approach. Entitlement programs are destroying the economy – $60trillion in unfunded liabilities (compare that to one year’s GDP) is just the beginning. It’s not compassionate to the poor to bankrupt the country.
vtr
Nn
vtr
We