Ayn Rand's philosophy vs Christian perspective, a look

I don't recall ever using the word "communal." I said social. And I was specifically talking about, as I said, human evolution and human nature, not artificial force. We have, as a species, evolved to cooperate with one another and to have a vested interested in the wellbeing of one another. Rand didn't understand that. She only understood myopic psychopathy.

 

Actually slaves often escaped from their masters. Some people would prefer to live as a fugitive than to live in slavery. Additionally you are forgetting about the last part of the verse:
Colossians 3:
22 Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to curry their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord.

Also, the bible has some advise for masters, that somehow isn't letting your slaves go free:

Colossians 4:
1 Masters, grant to your slaves justice and fairness, knowing that you too have a Master in heaven.

Ephesians 6:
5 Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ.
6 Obey them not only to win their favor when their eye is on you, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from your heart.
7 Serve wholeheartedly, as if you were serving the Lord, not people,
8 because you know that the Lord will reward each one for whatever good they do, whether they are slave or free.
9 And masters, treat your slaves in the same way. Do not threaten them, since you know that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no favoritism with him.

 

@Distraff
Oh, my dear, no-- I didn't mean the LITERATURE; I used to be an earnest Catholic (who took it all more seriously than most) so I know what Christianity touts itself as. I took it, from your post, that you were referring to the thing in the flesh, as it were; to Christianity as it exists as a living philosophy, through the actions of its self-affirmed adherents, when you said

So, assuming you've noticed that the religion, in practice, hasn't lived up to its billing, does that mean you prefer the way it has developed, in contrast to as it would have been, if its followers had gone, "by the Book," so to speak? If you thought that the philosophy, on the page, had gone, "too far w/ pacifism..." well it rose to be proud sponsor of the Crusades, was the Medieval Power-Broker extraordinaire, & even decided how Spain & Portugal should split up the South American continent & its workers-- that is, its heathen in need of conversion. It fought all manner of competing variants of itself, Donatists, Cathars, other Gnostics, Protestants, etc., not to forget about its internal purges, of the Inquisitional kind. It has certainly not been, on the whole (despite the small minority who have lived in the true spirit of the original faith), an especially pacifist religion-- more than a few, "Christian soldiers," have carried live ammo.

Christianity, authorities have claimed, was the philosophy used to underpin America's capitalist system, so we can check off, too far in the way of, "anti-capitalism;" have you never heard of televangelists?-- they make serious bank! And how many of the Christians that you know live in communes, beside nuns?

I hope that you accept my apology for sounding so flippant, but I'm just perplexed. Do you not see that overall, historically, Christianity has been pretty militaristic, materialistic (the Pope ain't no pauper), & other than the various orders of monks, et al, is not esp. communal, unless by that word you mean community-centered? I'm just trying to make clear why I don't understand your meaning.

You answered my question w/ a bunch of bible verses; is it your impression that, in the world, the faith is just as it reads on the page? Or was your comment only meant to refer to the philosophy, in the ideal? To sum up, would you be so kind as to elaborate on your comment, maybe w/ examples of being, "too...pacifist," etc.?

 

I was referring to the actual philosophy in the New Testament. Not the actions of Christians in the Middle Ages and in the US.

 

Then, do you feel that in current practice-- being less extreme in those areas you cited as some of its, "excesses--" Christianity is (give me a word here: better?)?

 

Though I am in no way an, "expert," on Ayn Rand, it doesn't seem to me that what she was selling, Extreme Individualism, was anything new, just her own variant on Nietsche's Ubermensch.

What does seem to merit examination, is how much accord appears to exist between Rand's and American, nationally elected Republicans', views of society. I think it would be a pretty safe bet, if Congressional Republicans were to name their favorite/most respected/most influential authors, Rand's name would show up on more than a few lists. Is this simply a matter of finding one's own feelings being validated by a, "respected," author? Anyone care to offer an observation, or opinion?

 

A little nit-picky, but I think she was quite different from Nietzsche. Nietzsche thought that logic and reason were . . . a little overrated, or overplayed. He thought the Enlightenment had put too much focus on those qualities and that it was time to swing the other direction and focus on emotion and ecstatic experiences instead to balance everything. For Rand, reason (her version of it, anyway) was everything. It was mankind's core function and identity. She never embraced the Dionysian side that Nietzsche focused his attention on. In Nietzschean terms, Rand's philosophy was purely Apollonian and ignored half of the human experience.

 

Not nit-picky at all, in fact very interesting & informative. Though I'd read Rand's shortest novel, I haven't read Nietzsche (& have been misspelling his name, as well), so my idea of his philosophy is very sketchy. I did once look him up in the encyclopedia, but finding out that he ended up in an insane asylum took a bit of the shine of promise, for me, away from his Superman theories. Your Cliff's-notes version makes it sound like interesting reading; how is the actual flow of his explications? I'm guessing any English versions have been translated; is there any translator you especially recommend, or suggest I avoid?

 

Ayn Rand's philosophy is pretty radical and very libertarian. Christians are a very diverse bunch on all parts of planet and of numerous political persuasion. But on average I'd say they have a more reasonable philosophy than Rand. But its best to evaluate Christian belief on a person by person basis.

 

Oh, no worries at all. I've written a couple of papers in college on the guy and I still don't really spell his name right until I get autocorrected. I mostly encountered his work in a mythology/folklore class, instead of a philosophy class, so that colors my interpretation.

I want to make it clear: the comments I gave you are solely based on one of his books . . . the one I actually like. The Birth of Tragedy. Take everything I say with a grain of salt.

He starts off by talking about a temple in Delphi (I think I have that right). The temple was unusual because it wasn't dedicated to all of the gods and it wasn't dedicated to just one god. Instead, two gods kind of timeshared the space. Part of the year the temple was dedicated to Apollo, and part of the year the temple was dedicated to Dionysus. The two were polar opposites, yet somehow close friends. Apollo was all about logic, order, mathematical patterns, ethics, perfection, etc. Dionysus was all about inebriation, chaos, orgies, etc. Nietzsche saw these as two fundamental sides of the human experience. And he thought that, as a society, we had been focused too much on the Apollo side and that we needed a Dionysian Renaissance. He thought that Greek tragedies were a perfect example of how we should view life: embrace it. All of it. The good, the bad, just celebrate your fate no matter what it its. The Greeks didn't sugar-coat reality in their art; they celebrated life, warts and all. And the Dionysian side wasn't egoistic. Quite the opposite. The logical Apollo side of our mind was the one that tried preserving the ego; the Dionysus side welcomed the way the ego dissolves when it experiences true ecstasy, becoming one with the world around you when you've indulged too much in booze or drugs, when you dance yourself silly.

Nietzsche had a test for this, though he proposed it as a possible afterlife. Suppose that we are all made of atoms and nothing else, and that there are a finite number of atoms in the universe, but that there is an infinite amount of time. He proposed that meant that there were only so many combinations of atoms and, given infinite time, those combinations would come back together over and over and over again. Eternal recurrence. Your life will play out, exactly as it has now, on repeat, for eternity. He wasn't quite sure if that's how things actually work, but he thought it was a useful thought experiment for us to ask: Are you horrified by this, or are you excited?

Anyway, that's all the fanboy things I have to say. I definitely find his "superman" ideas to be troublesome, he never really developed a satisfactory ethics, and yes, he died with a troubled, diseased mind. I can't really vouch for his other works, just this particular favorite. The one other thing I'd add, though, is this: he gets a bad wrap as being Nazi-esque, but that couldn't be further from the truth. He actually hated German nationalism and racial anti-Semitism. His sister, however, was basically a Nazi, and she inherited his intellectual property when he died, so she wrote some "introductory" material to his work to make it more palatable to racist fascists.

 

I must begin by congratulating Kazenatsu on finally delivering a moderately cogent explanation of his premise for this thread; I fail to see, however, why it could not have been done in the first posting, instead of the 29th.

But his thesis seems very reasonable, provided one has no inkling of the time-frames in question. A quick confirmation on wikipedia, however, makes Kazenatsu's thesis seem a little less solidly grounded.

Rand was born in 1905. The Bolshevik revolution didn't begin until 1917; therefore, the most formative years of Rand's life (0 - 12) were spent under the influence of a TSARIST, not Communist, system.

If this was central to Kazenatsu's argument, l would think he would go into some detail about the conditions at that time, since non-Russians are unlikely to be familiar w/ the details. The very general idea I have of the Russian Civil War is that it was a real mess, with both internal factions (the Red, White, & Green Armies) & external forces, vying for control-- not to mention various areas fighting for their own independence, as the Baltic States & others. And it took about 6 years to conclude, with the creation of the Soviet Union becoming a reality, at last, in 1923. That means Rand was then 18 years old, and her basic ideas about life should have been fairly well set. And 3 years later, at age 21, Rand emigrated from the Soviet Union to America.

While not all lives align w/ the typical script, there is a strong basis for the idea that our brains are their most plastic when we are young. In the Middle-East, among jihadist-type groups, they have a saying: "give us a child for the first 7 years, and we will have him for life." Without further explication from Kazenatsu, if he actually has the details that paint a different picture, it doesn't seem that merely living under the new Communist system from the ages of 18 - 21, should have so re-shaped Rand's world-view as Kaz has proposed. And, though being in the middle of a civil war as a pubescent girl, from age 12 through 18, was no doubt affecting & formative, it is not so clear that this would conform w/ the way it has been described by Kazenatsu:

The Communists had purposefully and intentionally removed all the other values that had previously existed in society, so once someone in that situation removes the Communist ideology, they are left with nothing - there is no real cause for altruism left. I believe that was the situation with Rand.

 

I'd actually been asking for your comparison of Christianity on paper, which you said had gone too far in various respects, & the actual phenomenon of Christianity in the world, as it is practiced. While I'm still a bit curious about how you'd compare the two-- for instance, someone following ONLY the teachings directly out of the mouth of Jesus, I'd think would possess a sound (which is to say, not self-contradictory) moral framework to follow, & one that is brief enough to both be fully understood & to allow the devotee to actually participate in that understanding, with his personal explorations of unmarked paths, as part of his spiritual growth-- I will accept your diplomatic answer about not judging the the influence of the religion, as a whole, but rather only on a person by person basis (unless you feel like taking a swing at that analysis).

 

I feel I have a much better understanding of him, already. Yes, and using both sides of one's brain isn't even New-Agey anymore; very mainstream. I can certainly see the point of his thought experiment, though I don't think he needed to go through all the other hypothetical conditions to get to the idea that, if you were stuck on a roller-coaster ride of your life, would you be relishing each returning dip & turn, or would you feel sick, or be bored & just dying to get off?

It actually reminds me, somewhat, of an analytic, spiritual-scenario of my own, but in which I arrive at an opposite result from Nietzsche, in my initial probability assessment, though oddly, the overall takeaways can be seen similarly. If you'd care to hear about it, just keep reading.

One of the most salient analogs that man has discerned from nature for the concept of reincarnation is the rain cycle. Water falls, in droplets, to Earth, sits for a time in puddles, or rides in rivers, but is eventually evaporated back up into the clouds, to later fall once more. But the aspect that was not understood back when man was taken w/ these musings was that every drop of water is actually composed of millions of H2O molecules, which separate into their constituent parts of hydrogen & oxygen atoms to accomplish their return trip to the clouds, whence the elements recombine in the proper proportion to once again become water molecules which, according to meteorological conditions, eventually clump together in sufficient numbers that the droplet's weight tears each from its ethereal realm, for a telluric descent.

So if our souls were actually analogous to this cycle of nature-- which, itself is oft repeated, in the carbon cycle, & so on-- and mirrored the process, it would mean that our animating spirit-- like the atoms, combined into the individual molecules of water-- is eternal; at the same time, each life's specific spiritual combination, or soul, would be unique & finite, for though rain's grains have fallen to Earth in number beyond calculation, the combination of the exact same water molecules, composed of the identical atoms, and arranged in their original order, seems highly unlikely to recur. Put simply, though both the atoms and the water are, from our perspective, immortal, every particular raindrop, falls only once.

 

Ayn Rand's entire "philosophy" was based mainly on the idiotic tautology "A is A", She spent her whole life feeling like Friedrich Nietzsche and sounding like Donald Duck

That goes a little far, her aesthetic is intriguing. In her view, beauty consists only in great deeds and maximal accomplishments She sees a person as most complete and fulfilled when they are heroic. Others do this too but Rand would base her whole society on requiring it from everyone and the whole idea of society is to make heroism unnecessary. Like most anarchists, she really just wants life for most everyone to be nasty, brutal, coarse, and short so her great men may stride through a dystopia sublime and undeterred.

Sorry, in the real world a hero ain't nothing but a sandwich

 

Yet the LW gets a pass for some of it's leaders being enamored of Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, that book dedicated to Satan.

 

I've never heard of it. Has it been around long? I'll look into it but I would be extremely surprised to find that this was something on the bookshelves (or in the desk drawers) of anywhere near the # of Democratic Congress members as the number of Republicans who have one or more of Ayn Rand's treatises laying around, nearby.

I've got 2 more quick questions for you, if you've got a minute. First, how do you know about this? Has Nancy Pelosi been making allusions to this author in press conferences that have just gone right over my head? Second, I don't think of Pelosi as LW, but some think of the entire Dem caucus that way; that is, I'd like us to define our terms.

When you say, "some of its (the LW's) leaders," to whom do you refer? Is it more than 3 people out of the hundreds in congress-- not to say that it would necessarily make it disregardable, depending on: 1)who those leaders are (Bernie Sanders & Elizabeth Warren have a lot more, "juice," in my book, than those 4 members that so many on the Right are always pointing at, in attempts to paint Democrats, generally, w/ that very broad brush) and 2) what this book, "dedicated to Satan," actually says.

If that's the sum total of the complaint against it, that some writer thought that would, conceptually, be a neat dedication, I'm not automatically alarmed by this. I would first point to our American belief in religious freedom, if you endorse that right. Then, I'd point out that to leap to conclusions about that person's beliefs based solely on that lone detail, is a ludicrously exaggerated reaction. I'm sure there is as wide a range amongst Satanists as among most religions, from the hard core for whom this dominates every aspect of their lives, to the bad-Satanists who don't usually go to services, except on high, unholy-days (Lucifer's birthday, or whatever), to those who only go for the social aspects of it (wild meet-&-greets in the temple basement after Black Mass) & who may not even think of, "the Devil," as anything real, but only as a symbol for human's libertine impulses. With curiosity, I await your response.

 

That can't be correct. AFAIK, the atmosphere is not burning hydrogen to produce water. The rest of the cycle described is admirable.

 

So, I want to devote more time to this at some point, but whether intentionally or not, you've delved into the original Buddhist concept of rebirth. And it's part of why they preferred the term "rebirth" to "reincarnation." In early Buddhism, your mind was considered to be just as much composed as aggregates as your body was. Like your physical atoms, they would come back together in different configurations, but never the same one with the same exact combination of aggregates. These aggregates can create the illusion of the same "raindrop" falling over and over again, but this illusion was an untruth to be overcome.

 

Really? And I thought this had been my original thought. Well, I guess it still is, since what you seem to be saying is that in Buddhist philosophy, each rebirth is a different version of, "you." Whereas, looking at the water cycle as an analog, there would only be a small bit of the previous, "you," in any subsequent incarnations, mixed w/ soul-pieces from many others (that's one way to broaden your perspective).

I do hope you'll come back to this, since there seems more depth to plumb. But until then, if you cross paths with any lunatics who believe they are Napoleon Bonaparte, don't be too quick to discount that there might be a fractional bit of truth in their claim.