[Christian Engineer Mass]

“the dangers of self-sacrifice”?

That’s not what the book is about AT ALL. Putting it that way put it at odds with Christianity.

Rational self-interest is not antithetical to self-sacrifice. Otherwise no one would ever willingly go to war.

[Larry Lucido]

Good point.

[JustSayNoToNannies]

"Let a man corrupt his values and his view of existence, let him profess that love is not self-enjoyment but self-denial, that virtue consists, not of pride, but of pity or pain or weakness or sacrifice, that the noblest love is born, not of admiration, but of charity, not in response to values, but in response to flaws—and he will have cut himself in two."

"For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors - between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it."

- http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged

[Tublecane]

“That’s not what the book is about AT ALL. Putting it that way put it at odds with Christianity.”

It being written by Rand put it at odds withy Christianity. She was as clear as can be on her opposition to religious ethics. It’s one of the major reasons people refer to her as a faded facsimile of Nietzsche.

Isn’t there a scene in which a desperate girl leaps into a river to avoid comfort from a nun and/or priest? She shouts something like, “Not your way!” before jumping to her doom. That’s right, Rand would rather kill herself (or at least thinks its plausible for one of her charactersn to) than listen to religion for a few seconds.

[Oztrich Boy]

Robin Hood is about taking stuff from the rich, and giving it to the poor.