Posted on 04/22/2003 5:25:25 PM PDT by RJCogburn
My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute. — Ayn Rand, Appendix to Atlas Shrugged
In her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and in nonfiction works such as Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, Ayn Rand forged a systematic philosophy of reason and freedom.
Rand was a passionate individualist. She wrote in praise of "the men of unborrowed vision," who live by the judgment of their own minds, willing to stand alone against tradition and popular opinion.
Her philosophy of Objectivism rejects the ethics of self-sacrifice and renunciation. She urged men to hold themselves and their lives as their highest values, and to live by the code of the free individual: self-reliance, integrity, rationality, productive effort.
Objectivism celebrates the power of man's mind, defending reason and science against every form of irrationalism. It provides an intellectual foundation for objective standards of truth and value.
Upholding the use of reason to transform nature and create wealth, Objectivism honors the businessman and the banker, no less than the philosopher and artist, as creators and as benefactors of mankind.
Ayn Rand was a champion of individual rights, which protect the sovereignty of the individual as an end in himself; and of capitalism, which is the only social system that allows people to live together peaceably, by voluntary trade, as independent equals.
Millions of readers have been inspired by the vision of life in Ayn Rand's novels. Scholars are exploring the trails she blazed in philosophy and other fields. Her principled defense of capitalism has drawn new adherents to the cause of economic and political liberty.
hmm...how much does that weigh on a laboratory scale?
The conclusions drawn from our Jewish brothers and sisters does not include the rich treasures of the New Testament. My view of origins, while being close in many ways, looks to the Word, Jesus Christ, and thus sees an exhaustive and clear solution.
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Humans can be pretty talented and ambitious, when it comes to amusement, but that's still what it is. Even though a talent for perspective can locate deer, and talent for rendering can communicate that information to others, a Reubens painting will not put deer hocks on the table.
Then (maybe you know what's coming) why in the same vein, or by whatever means you can tell, does man throughout time had the inner drive, very often beyond the survival motive, to worship?
I don't think this logically follows, even though you are speaking as if it does. You are offering the fact that humans have thought of the idea of God, as evidence that God exists and makes humans think of God. This form of reasoning will not get you your advanced degree in formal logic.
And in addition to the sacrificial nature of worship, let's go back to its affinity with music and poetry (and song) -- why that?
Why not that? If you allow that humans are naturally inventive, why would they not invent such things?
Be careful now, by arguing with you, I could influence you to being more atheist than you want to be! ;-)
I'm not an athiest at all.
Implying that I'm a false christian? Since I was baptized in The Church, have attended irregularly, have confessed from time to time, and haven't been excommunicated, I believe I officially qualify as a christian, in the eyes of most of the christians who have existed in the world.
allowing philosophical naturalists of one stripe or another to beg the question about human imagination and human feeeelings,
Oh, did you provide a devastating proof that human feelings and imagination could not have evolved from natural sources? Apparently I missed that.
I don't believe I said that, although I wouldn't be entirely uncomfortable if I had. I believe I said that moral restraints are there to keep you from doing any fool thing you feel like doing, regardless of consequences to others, whether from love or hate or indifference or any other emotion you happen to feel like endulging heedlessly.
Well, it is.
A very moving essay. How much does this morality-from-love weigh on a laboratory scale?
It most certainly is. Whether it persuades you or not is a different question. ESP in dogs, indeed. Can I interest you in some UFO sightings?
It comforts the living.
I don't think your naturalistic morality holds water, dohn. If you arge a naturalistic derivation or source, then I think it is you who is arguing "post hoc, ergo propter hoc,"
What have I assumed, that was to be demonstrated, about natural emotions being a feasable source of the urge to morality in humans?
and are only able to do it by ignoring evidence such as the kind laid out in the immediately foregoing.
Even if I accept the "evidence" that funerals have no central explanation arising from perfectly understandable human impulses of the living to feel comforted from grief, it still does not follow that this is a necessary demonstration of the existence of God's absolute moral laws.
It seems kind of silly to me to argue that any human impulse I can't readily explain is therefore proof of God's Transcendent Moral Laws--it could just be the universe having hiccups.
And I am saying it is not. I am suggesting that guilt is one manifestation of a very powerful survival tool we see operating in all large, social predatory mammals: natural inhibitory emotions against acts counter to the long-term survival of the pack--the pack being a better preserver and promulgator of your genes than you, all by yourself, are.
ALL traits are passed on to offspring. Tiger offspring have pretty much all the traits of tigers, and relatatively few of the traits of Octopi, for example.
-that would require genetic information, of which there is not even an inkling of evidence for. What a non-rational leap that is!
That is not correct. Emotional responses arise from a handful of enzymes that are produced by genes which we have a middling decent map of, presently. What we lack is completely detailed knowledge as to the triggering sequences and the nature of the physical and chemical couplings that bring them to fruition in response to external stimuli. But, that's true of all genetic information, to some degree.
Uh huh. And none of this, in any manner refutes my contention that women are engaged in eugenic selection when they choose, in vast numbers, to only breed with loyal, dutiful men, does it?
Unless, of course, they happen to be male Mideanite children.
is on the same moral plane as torturing babies (a value of the Canaanite community). NICE SYSTEM!!
The question before the house is: where do morals come from? It is not: do I happen to like the results or not? Pointing out the bad social effects of a belief about the nature of reality is NOT, by any stretch of the imagination, a valid refutation of that belief.
A separate set of questions once we've licked the irresponsible contention that morals are necessarily transcendental, and we can do nothing to affect them, is: What would be a good set of morals to have, and about what moral community? And since morals are inbuilt restraints on human behavior, pointing out that there are people without any, or that have made hopelessly disfunctional selections of the moral community to be loyal to, is NOT a refutation of the notion that it's a good idea that will likely pay dividends.
Now that's an interesting speculation. What evidence do you have that Satan isn't, in fact, the promulgator of the whole christian shebang, commissioned the bible, filled it with satan supporting rules, falsely claimed God's authorship, and has God hogtied in the basement? Do you have some evidence that this can't be true? Is your evidence, by any chance, based on the value to humans of God's Law?
I'm trying to get you to see that there is much more in life, about which we must make very important determinations, than that which can be heaped onto a laboratory scale.
If you take "objectivism" as your mantra (even though others have had empirical experiences with much of this truth and have written to you about it) you will choose as an act of your will, to turn your back on it.
A grave mistake.
It seems kind of silly to me to argue that any human impulse I can't readily explain is therefore proof of God's Transcendent Moral Laws--it could just be the universe having hiccups.
I didn't know the universe could get the hiccups, dohn. You should do stand-up.
My main point in writing my last had to do with the universal human practice of showing honor and respect for the dead, first and foremost; funerary practices follow from that. There doesn't appear to be much survival value in honoring one's dead.
Let me try to drill down on this point. There is an epic poem composed about 2600 years ago that maybe you've heard about. It's called the Iliad. The Homeric epics were designed to be recited, in spoken language, to a live audience. There is one scene in the Iliad that was exceptionally horrific to the sensibilities of the ancient Greeks, inspiring pathos, consternation, and pure moral outrage. That is the scene where the triumphant Achilles, having just slain Hector, ties up the lifeless body of his victim to the back of his chariot, and drags him around the walls of Troy. The humiliation and mutilation of a corpse was pure anathema to the Greeks. The outrage was so profoundly visceral that the Greeks had to say that such a thing was hybris against the gods, and surely would be severely punished by them. Why?
Yet today we still feel the same way about corpse mutilation. Certainly Americans were enraged, horrified by the images of our dead service members being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu not so long ago.
This horror of corpse abuse appears to be virtually universal. But why is this so? How are the survival prospects of human beings aided by this visceral, human emotional response? To the extent that such abuse tends to inspire the spirit of revenge, one can argue that from the standpoint of survival, this human response hurts, not helps, survival prospects, for it is the pretext for further violence.
If morality has a purely natural source, related to survival of the fittest, then how do we account for such useless (in those terms) but universal human traits as abhorrence of corpse mutilation?
You concluded: "It seems kind of silly to me to argue that any human impulse I can't readily explain is therefore proof of God's Transcendent Moral Laws--it could just be the universe having hiccups."
Silly? You ridicule human nature. And you ridicule God, who made it. dohn, you have a very strange sense of humor indeed.
I don't do that at all. The naked truth trumps. "The Rock" breaks Ockham's Razor so to speak, if the razor is man made and therefore based upon incomplete data as well as less than thorough processing.
It's all down on paper. The elegance as Paul said is "Christ and Christ crucified."
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