Posted on 06/11/2002 10:12:35 AM PDT by thinktwice
Edited on 04/14/2004 10:05:12 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
I don't agree; God didn't write America's founding documants -- men did. So drop your creationism argument and realize that ...
It was the supremacy of human wisdom -- reason -- that served as the authority to secure man's inalienable rights in America's founding documents.
That Ayn Rand sentence, quoted in post 1508, reads ...Reason is the most selfish human faculty: it has to be used in and by a man's own mind, and it's product -- truth -- makes him inflexible, intransigent, impervious to the power of any pack or ruler.
So your lying twist of words is exposed. It is an individual's ability to know truth through reason that prevents him from being ruled by those like you and your religious pack, whatever that religion might be.
Consider also that you have inferred that America's founding fathers -- while locking down individual freedom within the U.S. Constitution -- were some sort of religious tribal "pack" attempting to rule men.
Evil? Look homeward angel.
God is not the problem. The problem -- proven throughout history -- involves evil creatures claiming to speak for God.
Law is frequently perverted, even in the United States; and the only non-violent technique humans have to fight perverted law involves truth derived from reason, NOT "truth" revealed from "devine authority."
See post 1508 for more from an Ayn Rand quote that includes this ...
Power-seekers have always known that if men are to made submissive, the obstacle is not their feelings, their wishes, or their "instinct," but their minds; if men are to be ruled, the enemy is reason.
How do you know, without using reason, that "Our Republic was founded on the Authority of God the Creator of Man"?
How do you kinw, without using reason, that ..."Through that creation we were endowed with in-alienable rights that reason has nothing to do with"?
Non-religious and anti-Judeo-Christian empires and philosophies have killed more people than any so called "religious war".
Think Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Genghis Ghan, China and the Warring States.
Do you understand the term Fascism?
“Ernst Nolte has defined fascism as “the practical and violent resistance to transcendence”. Whereas the Judeo-Christian tradition focuses on a transcendent God and a transcendent moral law, fascist “spirituality” is centered upon what is tangible. Nature and the community assume the mystical role they held in the ancient mythological religions. Religious zeal is displaced away from the transcendent onto the immanent: the land, the people, the blood, and the will.
Fascists seek an organic, neomythological unity of nature, the community and the self. The Concepts of a God who is above nature and a moral law that is above society (and reason) are rejected.”
From: Modern Fascism
If you read some Communist works and Nazi works you will see they make many of your points. I do not think you are are either, however if you take you circular logic into policy and society that is where you end up.
False, (another questionable twist on your part) those packs spoken of by Ayn Rand were tribal, criminal, governmental or religious in nature.
2. A man only needs reason to understand that his inalienable rights are from outside man.
Any atheist would challenge you on that; but ... according to you, reason has no authority ... how can you now claim that reason is needed to understand anything?
3. If our inalienable rights and thus our Constitution are merely products of men’s reason they cannot be binding to any man.
You seem to be inferring that the U.S. Constitution is an inspired product of God.
Personally, I see goodness in truth, truth being the recognition of reality where reason is man's standard for knowing truth. And I also see goodness in the U.S. Constitution which I think is a product of good men (some religious, some not) dedicated to using reason to understand truths about reality.
4. First you say reason creates inalienable rights,
I would not say such a thing -- another questionable twist on your part.
5. If man gives right the man can take them away.
That is a simplistic truth, but facts show that "We the People" -- not God -- secured some inalienable and individual rights in the U.S. Constitution; and facts also show that various internal tyrants, religious organizations, legislatures, courts and Presidents have since worked to add or take away rights.
6. They (rights) have to come from outside man, as mans reason has no authority over another man.
How did you or the founders know -- without using individual human minds; i.e. using reason -- that human rights come from a Supreme Being?
I'll end this with another Ayn Rand quote ... From her essay titled "Faith and Force; The Destroyers of the Modern World."
I have said that faith and force are corollaries, and that mysticism will always lead to the rule of brutality. The cause of it is contained in the very nature of mysticism. Reason is the only objective means of communication and of understanding among men; when men deal with one another by means of reason, reality is their objective standard and frame of reference. But when men claim to possess supernatural means of knowledge, no persuasion, communication or understanding are possible. Why do we kill wild animals in the jungle? Because no other way of dealing with them is open to us. And that is the state to which mysticism reduces mankind -- a state where, in case of disagreement, men have no recourse except to physical violence."
And I'll add ... a state where suicide bombing religious nuts fly airplanes into crowded public buildings in New York and Virginia.
It's interesting you should bring up fascism, define it wrong, and then use your fraudulent definition to make debate points. Wrong according to my dictionary where it's defined ....
fascism ... A political philosophy, movement or regime that exalts nation and race and stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader.
And interesting because Ayn Rand escaped from communist Russia at the age of about 21 -- hating communism, fascism, any statist government -- to come to America and to fully develop a written political philosophy for capitalism, the key elements of which are individual freedom, property rights, and a justice system to protect those rights.
One of Ayn Rand's American proteges was Alan Greenspan of current Federal Reserve fame. Greenspan, in his mid- twenties, was among those that joined Ayn Rand weekly to review her philosophical novel Atlas Shrugged as she wrote it; a book that is now the world's number two best seller behind the Bible.
Back to fascism -- a political philosophy quite similar to religious philosophies ... compare the definition above with one I've created that fits way too many ... religions ...
religion ... A political philosophy, movement or regime that exalts a doctrine regarding faith and morals and stands for a centralized theocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader.
Wrong, I know truth can be derived from reason.
The simpliest example concerns every word defined in dictionaries. When humans develop a concept, they combine perceptual inputs with reason to define that concept -- every word in your dictionary covers one or more concepts, some simple and some complex, all of which are "truths" derived from reason until proven otherwise.
There are higher level examples, dealing with abstractions -- and abstractions from abstractions -- all of which is covered well, using simple words, in Ayn Rand's Epistemology book. Where does your "truth" come from?
Still reasoning of men. They reasoned those packs.
Any atheist would challenge you on that; but ... according to you, reason has no authority ... how can you now claim that reason is needed to understand anything?
Reason does not need authority to come to a conclusion. It WOULD need authority to make someone else act on that conclusion.
You seem to be inferring that the U.S. Constitution is an inspired product of God.
No, it is the reasoning of man to find the best form of Government to preserve the Endowed rights of man. It is built on the foundation of inalienable rights endowed by the Creator as the Founders stated. Were the Founders inspired by God? I think we can find just that stated in writings from many of these great men.
The fascist aligned themselves not only against the Jews but more against what the Jews contributed to Western civilization. A transcendent God, who reveals a transcendent moral law, was anathema to the fascist. Such transcendence, they argued, alienates human beings from nature and from themselves.
Much of what you say is right along line the philosophy of the Fascist.
I think you had better actually read some Fascist writings, beyond the dictionary.
The fascist aligned themselves not only against the Jews but more against what the Jews contributed to Western civilization. A transcendent God, who reveals a transcendent moral law, was anathema to the fascist. Such transcendence, they argued, alienates human beings from nature and from themselves.
Have you read both Aristotle’s Politics and Plato’s Republic? Do you know the difference between the philosophies? Do you know why Western civilization has grown more from Plato and not Aristotle? I am no scholar, just studing both men's philosophies.
I've read Aristotle's more important works, and enough of Plato to know Plato is responsible for many of the spaced-out ideas expressed in modern religion. In Plato's Phaedo, for example, his argument for an afterlife is ... If out of life comes death, then out of death must come life ... which is popular to those that like circular logic.
What changed me after exposure to Plato's work was probably reading Homer's works, a great amount of other Greek literature and history, and writing a paper on "Hell, according to Homer, Virgil and Milton" that revealed how much Hell changed over time.
Ayn Rand came to my attention after that, and her common-sense philosophy is like a breath of fresh air. Over time, reading Rand's material trains people to think for themselves -- in terms of ssentials. Her work is brilliant.
As I've heard it from all sources but you, Aristotle is recognized as the father of Western Civilization. Plato, however, might claim credit for being a father to Christian religions.
Where is it -- school, church, or what -- that you're getting your ideas?
"There is no such thing as a collective mind." -- Basically from Ayn Rand.
2. Reason does not need authority to come to a conclusion. It WOULD need authority to make someone else act on that conclusion.
Statist cults and nations use pointed guns to enforce their "reasoned conclusion" authority.
3. You wrote ... If our inalienable rights and thus our Constitution are merely products of men’s reason they cannot be binding to any man.
To which I responded ... "You seem to be inferring that the U.S. Constitution is an inspired product of God."
To which you responded ... No, it is the reasoning of man to find the best form of Government to preserve the Endowed rights of man. It is built on the foundation of inalienable rights endowed by the Creator as the Founders stated. Were the Founders inspired by God? I think we can find just that stated in writings from many of these great men.
You actually are, in a way, claiming that the U. S. Constitution is an inspired product of God.
Have we now a new chapter for the Bible?
4. The fascist aligned themselves not only against the Jews but more against what the Jews contributed to Western civilization
Nice try, but ... You didn't know that Ayn Rand was Jewish? Her father was a merchant in St. Petersburg, Russia; and her real name was Alice Rosenbaum.
5. Much of what you say is right along line the philosophy of the Fascist.
I am an anti-communist, anti-fascist, capitalist American that knows what a fascist is, and you can take your fraudulent definition for fascist and ... Well, you know.
Fascism is not anti-Jewish thing. It is a anti-transcendent God and transcendent moral law. A person of Jewish heritage can prescribe to fascism.
Look at fascism’s key propagators in the 20th century and see the influence over your very thought processes. Martin Heidegger, Paul De Man, Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, W.B. Yeats, Carl Jung, T.E. Hulme, Margaret Sanger; all with ties to Hitler and/or Mussolini. Atheism, Neo-Paganism, existentialism, deconstruction, antimonotheism, agrarianism and related positions taken together form a typical, mutually reinforcing fascist constellation.
Also, Fascism is not anti-Capitalist. You can be Capitalist and Fascsist. You must be anti-transcendent God and transcendent moral law.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.