Posted on 01/05/2005 11:22:24 AM PST by annyokie
LOL! #147
As a remedy and enjoyable alternative, I recommend Dostoevsky.
LOL! You're on a roll 8-)
A lot of the criticism on this thread is akin to criticizing Cinderella because the coach turns into a pumpkin at midnight bump.
This is a position that reduces morality to a matter of technological progress -- it is, in other words, relative and not objective. To see the problem, consider preemie babies who've survived -- the earliest on record being born at about 21 weeks.
By your standard, 21 weeks would have to be the de facto current standard for the beginnings of "human" life, but that is in large part a matter of technology. We can probably anticipate improved medical techniques that allow even more premature babies to survive.
But, of course, the real issue is much more basic -- and much less supportable on so-called "objectivist" grounds.
The argument over whether a child is "human" or not depends in large part on whether or not the mother wants to be pregnant in the first place. If she wants the baby, it's "human." Otherwise, it's a mere "fetus."
No. The court took a basically agnostic position (which is problmatic for courts which must try murder cases).
My understanding is that Roe v. Wade legalized abortion through the first trimester, and its companion case, Doe v. Bolton, allowed abortion in cases involving the "health of the mother." Psychological health was included under the definition of health, thus effectively legalizing abortion through all nine months of pregnancy.
LOL!
I suppose you're right about that, though in retrospect I find that it is rather too similar to the "woman trying to pick up the pieces after she finds herself with dead child and cheating husband" genre that seems to dominate the Oprah book list....
Worse, this book was the one for which I was most embarrassed on Rand's behalf. The problem being, of course, that she billed the book as being as close to autobiographical as anything she'd ever write. Thus clumpy, homely young Alissa Rosenbaum (Rand's real name) becomes, as usual, the lithe, beautiful, intelligent, and supremely moral heroine -- and we understand that all of Rand's lithe, beautiful, intelligent, and supremely moral heroines are, in fact, supposed to represent Rand herself. Her icon-loving sister becomes a caricature of later, oozier "mystics of mind." Her father is nice but weak -- another prototype (doesn't he eventually side with the other sister?).
IMO the only arresting character was her love interest, Lev(?), and she apparently lost interest in using him to draw out the complexities of real people. Instead, we see her in later books dissecting the poor fellow. The "good parts" of Lev being lumped into her heroes, and the "bad parts" being packed into her great villains. If anything, the difference between Lev and other characters shows the great extent to which Ms. Rand was willing to subjugate realism to ideological stereotypes.
This points out the greatest weakness of Rand's philosophy. She insisted on placing people on the knife blade of "rational" vs. "irrational," which excludes pretty much all of real human life; and it certainly excludes most of the important aspects of real human interaction. For example, I don't think strict objectivism leaves any room for humor, especially of the Monty Python or Cartoon type. An ideology devoid of humor certainly helps to explain Rand's dark and turgid style -- we are to derive pleasure from the Message, and that alone.
"For many it is when the fetus breathes on its own outside the womb. "
No it is when the genetic material from egg and sperm are united. This is the moment when human life begins.
"That is the basis for Roe vs Wade is it not?"
This fundamentally flawed decision introduced definitions out of whole cloth, not based on legal tradition. Fetuses do not become human as they already are. The do not become human at the time of delivery...they are simply moving along in the maturation process as all humans are.
Your point about breathing on one's own as a marker of human life makes no sense for many reasons, but one concerns more mature humans who cannot breathe on their own at different stages in their lives.
Here is a website for more info:
http://unbornperson.com/section_3.htm
" Branden never had children of his own, but did marry someone who had some."
many thanks
I agree entirely; I am a great fan of San Tomas.
Ayn Rand is trivial on these matters.
But even with a master of theology, there is a limit beyond which reason really will not go.
The point with religion is that we are left with belief as the ultimate argument, which is as it should be.
Hilarious stuff. Ayn is an awful novelist and marginal, at best, as a philosopher. And yes I have read all her major fiction. It will NEVER be on a reading required in colleges because it is godawful, filled with endless blathering, two dimensional characters and worse.
AS might have been decent had it been cut in half, well it would have only been half as bad at worst.
This Christian has read Ayn. Her writings appeal to the juvenile and are of little value to any but the simplistic.
St. Thomas would agree.
The point with religion is that we are left with belief as the ultimate argument, which is as it should be.
In some respects, particularly regarding the Trinity and Christ's divinity, although reasonable and probable historical arguments can be made for the latter. But we moderns tend to sell reason short. God's existence can be known through reason alone. The Bible confirms this.
LoL that was the shortest one. You need some real torture get on Atlas Shrugged soon!!!
Dreadful now that is the perfect term for her stuff. And it is such a nice high class insult.
Let's compare writers whose language was not originally English. Say Ayn and Joseph Conrad. The latter wrote as well as any native born ever did. But not the former.
Melville was a philosopher and Moby Dick one of the greatest of all novels.
20 million sold and 1 million read completely.
Seems to be the most important point about her.
Rand speaks of axioms and ideas. Rand is also a materialist. So how would she define an idea? Is it a group of atoms?<sigh> Is theism really so fundamentally based on the composition fallacy?I've read a lot of her books, and this is one of many, many insurmountable problems arising from her various dogmatic beliefs that she simply never addresses.
OK, tell me this: When you combine the flammable gas, oxygen, with the explosive gas, hydrogen, and get the totally non-flammable & non-explosive, dense liquid water, where did the flammability & explosiveness go? Where did water's fire-retardance come from? Where did all that extra density come from?
How could water possibly contain so much fire retardance ability? Isn't it just a bunch of atoms? If us naturalists are correct, then complex objects are merely the sum of their component parts, right? So where did the flammability & explosiveness go? Where did the vast increase in density that makes H2O a liquid at room temperature come from? Are flame retardance & density supernatural qualities that were injected into each water molecule when they were formed?
When you figure out the answer to the mystery (to an Idealist) of water, you'll see why the composition fallacy is a fallacy, and why human beings, who are made up entirely of purely natural atoms, are fully capable of generating immaterial thoughts.
I'll agree with you here, at least as regards her writing. It's almost like she was embarrassed by it or something. And yet she sometimes wrote of characters experiencing childlike joy at discovering things about the world. Her biographers have also referred to her guilty pleasure, early 20th Century pop music she called her "tiddlywink" music.
But overall, yes, she sure did come off as being way too humorless. Kind of like my grandmother. She was a person you just had to respect for her indomitable spirit & rock-like moral grounding, especially in the face of a hardscrabble childhood in Alabama & the early death of her husband forcing her to raise 2 daughters alone. But I never once saw her laugh out loud, or even "get" a joke. If I tried really hard I could try to argue that gramma's lack of humor is evidence that pious religious belief deadens the soul.
Sure, arguments, ideas, etc. can be a reflection of people's personalities. In this you're actually agreeing with Rand! Her whole aesthetic philosophy of Romantic Realism assumes that a work of art tends to illustrate or express the creator's sense of life, which flows from their operating philosophy. A person's personality can give you clues to where they're coming from, and what assumptions they're making about how the world works that they didn't bother to mention.
But you also have to learn to separate arguments from their authors & examine them logically on their own merits.
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