[thinktwice]

Most of the founders believed in the morality of freedoms as coming from God. Ayn Rand did not.

From Ayn Rand's Objectivist Ethics ... "Ethics is not a mystic fantasy -- nor a social convention -- nor a dispensible, subjective luxury, to be switched or discarded in any emergency. Ethics is an objective, metaphysical necessity of man'a survival -- not by the grace of the supernatural, nor of your neighbors nor of your whims, but by the grace of reality and the nature of life."

In other words, man has a spiritual nature in a real world universe where Man's creator (whatever) seems to have expected men to survive by using their real world minds.

[Prysson]

You are proving my own point.

Any please dont quote Ayn Rand at me I have read her books numerous times.

My point remains however that Ayn Rand was a religious Bigot. She percieved religion as a scapegoat of man offering excuse for failure and providing opiates to peoples unpleasant truths. They need a God to explain their sense of smallness, a heaven to answer for the hell they create for themselves in life. She had all kinds of reasons. She despised churches because she percieved them to prey off of peoples insecurities and shackle them to some false hope of a worth that they did not earn.

Her aruments were in the end utterly flawed by her own blind animosity.

Her prejudice is dripping from every word. Just because Ayn Rand who hated religion calls religion a mystic fantasy does not make it a mystic fantasy. Because she BELIEVED it was a social convention does not make a social convention. Ayn Rand stating something to be fact does not make it a fact. It makes it an opinion.

Her claim of a natural life as I explained earlier is by her own admission left unanswered....why is it unanswered. Because she doesnt have a solution. She doesnt like the answer that a god determines those things...so lets just leave them unanswered. Its a fact of nature she claims. Based on what. Your understanding of rightness and wrongness...I come again to the argument. Where is that perspective of rightness and wrongness coming from. It is where as a philosopher Ayn Rand FAILED UTTERLY. You can not dismiss as superstiction a question that you yourself refuse to answer.

She claims that it is right because the value of her own mind makes it so...end of story. Talk about a circular argument. What gives her that understanding that what she percieves to be good is right and good. She refuses to answer. She intentionally and blatently refuses to answer. The reason is clear. She has no answer and she doesn like where it leads her. So she ends the line with her own reasoning and goes no further.

I would also mention that Ayn Rand suffered a sever amount of criticism for living what many would regard as an immoral lifestyle. She had a multitude of affairs (as did her own husband) and she had the openly. She was highly criticized and had a very personal reason to want to create arguments why morality is not a "social" convention. Depsite your romantic view of Ayn Rand she was not by all accounts a terribly happy woman. She was by no means perfect and I while I have tremendous respect for some of her positions regarding mans worth and value I do not by any stretch hold her up and a demi-god as you seem to do.
She had her own issues and those issues effected her philosophy and her worldview. Issues like hating religion.

I have been down that road. I have argued and argued and turned her words inside and out trying to grasp hold of what she was getting at. She fails utterly to answer the question. She posites as a truth a belief that something is right and something is wrong. But she refuses to answer WHY it is right and wrong. To say that because I decided it was does not cut the mustard.