[Billthedrill]

Rand didn't believe in Satan any more than she believed in God, i.e. not at all. But con men such as LaVey - he was a self-promoting hedonist, not a Satanist - appeared in abundance in Atlas Shrugged, and they were cast as villains. The author would benefit a great deal from actually reading the work he purports to criticize.

Common to the two is the erroneous proposition that man, and not God, is the ultimate authority behind morality, but there they depart. For LaVey the true character of man, freed from the strictures of a false religion, was that of swine; for Rand that true nature was that of angels that replaced the ones in whom she refused to believe. The first is contemptible, the second, pitiable, but they are not the same illusion. IMHO, of course.

[rdcbn]

The early part of the 20th Century saw the rise of several materialistic philosophical outlooks.

Leninist/Stalinist Communism, Facism and Objectivism.

Objectivism at it's heart is atheistic economic Darwinism. It is a philosopical counterpoint to atheistic Communism

Under both Objectivism and Communism the strong oppress the weak

[rdcbn]

The early part of the 20th Century saw the rise of several materialistic philosophical outlooks.

Leninist/Stalinist Communism, Facism and Objectivism.

Objectivism at it's heart is atheistic economic Darwinism. It is a philosopical counterpoint to atheistic Communism

Under both Objectivism and Communism the strong oppress the weak

[rdcbn]

The early part of the 20th Century saw the rise of several materialistic philosophical outlooks.

Leninist/Stalinist Communism, Facism and Objectivism.

Objectivism at it's heart is atheistic economic Darwinism. It is a philosopical counterpoint to atheistic Communism

Under both Objectivism and Communism the strong oppress the weak

[danielmryan]

The author would benefit a great deal from actually reading the work he purports to criticize.

Allow me to throw in a curve ball: a Christian could benefit, as a Christian, by reading Atlas Shrugged. Here's how: all of Rand's villains, in one way or another, are vain. What she calls "incompetence" is a kind of vanity. Thus, Atlas can be read as a powerful illustration of why and how vanity is a deadly sin.

I should add that doing so means keeping this "lens," as it were, in the back of the mind as a pre-judgment - and returning to the Bible by reading the book of Ecclesiastes afterwards.