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Ayn Rand was an Atheist. The prominent Founding Fathers shared her views.

No, I don't think that's quite right OldSpice. Not that Ayn Rand wasn't an atheist. She was. What I'm driving at is Ayn Rand shared some of the Founding Fathers' views. She simply edited out all the parts she disagreed with.

For instance, she was glad to accept bennies like unalienable rights. But she thought she could ignore the Founding Fathers' insistence that the only thing that makes a right unalienable is because it is the direct grant of the Creator. And of course, this Creator is the God of Judeo-Christian tradition, itself the major bulwark of natural law theory.

The way the Founding Fathers understood the idea of unalienable right — e.g., life, liberty, property (or "pursuit of happiness") — was to see it as something imbued in human nature itself. And it was the Creator Who directly did the "imbuing" when He created man.

Sneer at that, anyone who wants to. But you'd be sneering at the Founding Fathers if you did.

According to natural law theory, God, being Creator and ultimate authority of His creation, is thus universally superior to the State — i.e., to any human system of government — in the order of natural justice. From whence it follows that no State has the power or authority to set aside, abridge, tamper with, etc., any direct grant of God.

In short, the Founders knew something that Rand didn't: It is the authority of God alone that authenticates and defends the natural, unalienable rights of every human person.

Natural law/natural justice — the basis of American justice — is "natural" because it is founded in God. All other systems of "justice" are founded in the ideologies of transient intellectuals.

Evidently Rand thought that unalienable rights could be secured on some other basis than that which the Founding Fathers insisted upon. But she never really tells us what that basis is.

I gather the dear lady just had an enormous blind spot.

Meanwhile, natural law theory is under attack and traduced from all sides nowadays — as Linda Kimball's splendid article so cogently documents.

Thank you oh so very much for your beautiful essay-post, dearest sister in Christ!

I'm not sure our FRiend could appreciate the relevance of inalienable rights. As I recall OldSpice is not American but British - is that right, OldSpice?

At the root, a right which is inalienable, endowed by our Creator, is not a right the government can take away. It was our legal and moral standing for declaring independence from England.

Should a future government attempt to take away those inalienable rights, the citizens of America would have the same legal and moral standing as they did with the Declaration of Independence to hit the "reset" button.

And as many here will testify, that is the underlying reason for the 2^nd Amendment - the right to keep and bear arms.

Nowadays?

Let's do a review... and go back to 1834:

"But you are told that our ancestors brought with them the Common Law of England, and that Christianity is a part of the Common Law. There are in the books some sayings of the English Judges that Christianity is a part of the Common Law, and one of the most distinguished among those, who have held this doctrine, is the celebrated Sir Matthew Hale. But this Judge is one of those Judges, who have condemned persons for witchcraft, and the ermine of his judicial robes was stained with the blood of the innocent victims of superstition. Sir Matthew Hale would be as good authority to sustain a prosecution for witchcraft, as to sustain the present prosecution against the defendant, by establishing that Christianity is a part of the Common Law of England. Indeed Sir Matthew Hale was the great authority in Massachusetts to sustain the prosecutions for witchcraft which disgraced our early history. What is the Common Law of England ? It is called the customs of immemorial antiquity handed down by tradition, among the English people. Now during the period of the existence of the Common Law, England has had all kinds of religion ? Has the Common Law embraced all those kinds of religion ? Are they parts of the Common Law ? Yet one must be as well as another, or else none of those various kinds of religion are parts of the system. The Common Law is older than Christianity. In the earliest times of British history, the British religion was the dark superstitions of the Druids, the Priests of Mona's isle, who worshipped in the deepest recesses of the woods, and offered up the horrid sacrifice of human victims to the objects of their idolatry. Is this religion a part of the Common Law? When the Romans came they brought with them the Gods of Rome, and Caesar, who found London a great place, and as Shakespeare tells us in Richard the Third, built the Tower, bore with him the God of War and the other Gods of his Country. Did the religion of ancient Rome become a part of the Common Law of England ? When the Saxons invaded Britain, they brought with them their Gods of War, Woden and Thor ? Did the Saxon religion become a part of the Common Law ? Yet two days in the week in England and the United States, Wednesday and Thursday bear the names of their Deities, and have perpetuated the memory of these " fabled Gods " even to the present day. It was not till the reign of Claudius, the successor of Tiberius in whose reign Jesus Christ was crucified, that Christianity was introduced into England, by means of the conversion of a noble Jady, by a missionary from Rome. Up to that period surely, Christianity was no part of the Common Law of England. The religion of England has been often changed, and the dates of the changes, are well known, and some of them are recent affairs. But the Common Law is of immemorial antiquity, and as old as the native Britons, say the English law books, and therefore these various kinds of religion, introduced within legal memory, and can be no part of this system of immemorial antiquity. England, after the introduction of Christianity, embraced the Catholic religion."

Link

“The source of man’s rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A—and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational. Any group, any gang, any nation that attempts to negate man’s rights, is wrong, which means: is evil, which means: is anti-life.”

-Galt’s Speech, Atlas Shrugged

“Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).”

-“Collectivized ‘Rights,” The Virtue of Selfishness

““Rights” are a moral concept—the concept that provides a logical transition from the principles guiding an individual’s actions to the principles guiding his relationship with others—the concept that preserves and protects individual morality in a social context—the link between the moral code of a man and the legal code of a society, between ethics and politics. Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.”

-“Man’s Rights,” The Virtue of Selfishness

Evidently Rand thought that unalienable rights could be secured on some other basis than that which the Founding Fathers insisted upon. But she never really tells us what that basis is. I gather the dear lady just had an enormous blind spot.

I would argue that it was not a "blind spot." Instead, I suspect that Rand's atheism was actually the starting point of her philosophy, as opposed to being a logical consequence of it. She may well have wanted to find some way of justifying the last 6 Commandments without having to deal with the unpleasant (to her) implications of the first four.

You can see hints of this if you take seriously the basic premises of Rand's philosophy. They really don't hold up to sustained analysis; at the very least, they don't hold up as "objective" premises. In fact, in many respects they're not even consistent among themselves. And her "highest moral purpose" -- pursuit of happiness -- isn't even an objective concept.

Her biggest error -- and it's clearly an error -- is to suggest that "man -- every man -- is an end in himself," represents an objectively true statement. Just to pick one among several objections to this, reference to the real world (in accordance with Rand's own demands) suggests that we are much more plausibly characterized as a means to our children's ends.

A charitable person might suggest that the childless Rand never grasped the implications of being a parent. OTOH, given the fact that Rand was a rather ardent supporter of abortion, it would seem that she understood full well the implications of parenthood and, in typical fashion, she simply blasted past the problem, hoping nobody would notice.

Note that we need not even invoke God to see that Rand's philosophy is built on sand. Acknowledgement of God's existence only makes the collapse more spectacular.

This is all pretty obvious stuff -- certainly not something that could easily be missed by a person who accorded such weight to reason and logic. I've concluded that her philosophy was rooted in a) her own towering ego; and b) a childishly emotional opposition to the One who posed the greatest threat to it.

Perhaps you recall the little anecdote from Atlas Shrugged, when the toddler Dagny Taggart threw such a fit in church that they never took her back. This was almost certainly Rand expressing her own essentially child-like reaction to the implications of God and His Church.

Rand thought that unalienable rights could be secured on some other basis than that which the Founding Fathers insisted upon. But she never really tells us what that basis is.

Because she could not...

Morality and all of those associated ideals are rooted entirely in the presupposition that some higher power defines what is correct for human behavior.

The very idea that human beings have individual rights not subject to the whims of an earthly monarch, but subject to the laws of Yahweh, is directly from Moses.

Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence...

"...to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them... that all men are created... Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world... with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence..."