Ayn Rand Interview with Tom Snyder (1979)

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[Reily]

She approved of the founder’s culture but in her mind we got away from that.

[AloneInMass]

PFL

[Angelino97]

She’s a Russian Jew! Ayn Rand is her pen name. Her actual name is Anna Rosenbaum. So why would she know much about Christianity?

She wouldn't, not unless she studied it, which people of any background can do.

My point is, a rational person knows what they don't know. But when it comes to Christianity, it seems that every non-Christian feels competent to comment on it without studying it. Atheists do so all the time.

[Publius]

Rand ping.

[Angelino97]

This interview was in 1979. Ayn said at one point, "The most dangerous thing in this country today are the universities, because they are teaching the kind of ideas that necessarily would have to lead to the destruction of this country ."

Accurate, but a common observation by then.

In 1978, John Leboutillier came out with Harvard Hates America: The Odyssey of a Born-Again American. I actually read it at the time, and still have it somewhere.

And I think Buckley's God and Man at Yale was published in 1951.

[Angelino97]

In her interview on Donahue, Rand said that women were unqualified to be President, because it was not in the nature of women to command man.

Rand did support women's right to vote, and she said she'd vote for a woman running for Congress or Senate, just not for President.

[cgbg]

Ayn Rand opposed all religions including the Judaism which she did fully understand—and was very open about it.

[aquila48]

I would almost be for the opposite. Let women run for any office but don’t let them vote.

There are many good, rational women, but definitely the minority. So whereas one can find a good woman leader, the mass of women, because of their emotional nature, would more often than not pick as leader one like them, weak and emotional.

Whereas, I think men would gladly vote for a Margaret Thatcher.

[rlmorel]

Thank you, Publius. I will check it out...

[Reily]

Again given the way Jews were treated in Czarist Russia I doubt she was motivated to learn anything about Christianity.

[aquila48]

I don’t disagree with anything she said.

With me, she was preaching to the choir.

She’s as grounded in reality, as grounding could ever possibly get.

If there’s anything I would disagree with her is on atheism. No one can be sure that there isn’t (or is) a higher being, so the more rational position is to be agnostic.

We like to think of ourselves as the highest form of creation and that what our senses reveal is all there is. But maybe an amoeba thinks the same about itself, and it will never know of our existence nor our nature.

So it’s very possible that we are to God what an amoeba is to us.

[dfwgator]