Ayn Rand - GOP Thinker.

[_moksha]

Could we turn your interlocution around on you Subgenius and ask how greed is good?

[_subgenius]

I base this on greed being antithetical to the Christian value system

yeah, i get that, but you are being redundant - and trying to move the goalpost from selfish to greed, which are two conditions that are similar but are quite distinct in terms of morality, on terms of good/bad. Even if you consider both to be "bad" - greed is a manifestation of a certain selfish behavior therefore it is a "type" of selfishness, an intense application of selfishness.

I will stick with "selfish" as expressed in the OP for this discussion and ask that you clarify "selfish" in terms of the Christian/Western value system that you describe here....especially given how another poster considers derailment on this topic.

on which most of our Western Civilization ethics are based.

duly noted.
You are stating that good/bad is primarily founded on Christian traditions and teachings. Which seems to imply that atheism shares this foundation? or is there a yet to be revealed foundation for the atheistic tradition with regards to ethics and morality?

[_Chap]

You are stating that good/bad is primarily founded on Christian traditions and teachings.

That would be nonsensical, if stated.

Even the most literal Christian believer would concede that Adam and Eve 'knew good and evil' as soon as they tasted the fruit of the forbidden tree - like it said in the Bible. No Christian theologian has claimed that humanity did not know right and wrong before the Christian revelation - or before Noah's encounter with his deity, or the covenant at Sinai for that matter. Perhaps you have noticed that Jesus assumes that Jews are perfectly aware of the difference between right and wrong, and indeed the Jewish deity throughout the Old Testament takes it for granted right from the start of the Genesis story after Adam and Eve leave the garden that the people he addresses know when they are doing wrong - the problem is what they do, not what they know.

The Christian revelation concerns a claim that the deity of that religion has made a particular arrangement to free humanity of the supposed consequences of a human predisposition to violate the basic moral standards that (no theologian of the main Christian traditions has disputed) are basically common to the great majority of humanity.

I don't dispute, of course, that quite a few naïve and historically ignorant Christians nowadays THINK that people who are not Christians do not know the difference between right and wrong. But they are wrong about that.

[_The CCC]

Hers was a world of a few Uber-Capitalists makers and a vast majority of useless takers. That desired to die.

Ayn Rand was not consistent in her own actions. She claimed to be independent of morality and against others receiving governmental benefits they had not directly paid for. She smoked like a chimney. But when told she could not afford the medical care based on her own work. She applied for, and got, the money from her husband's Social Security Insurance account.

I don't think it is hypocritical neccessarily to receive government benefits when you oppose the existence of those benefits, but that's neither her nor there. It has absolutely nothing to do with my point. My point is that the linked article offers some inapt criticisms of Rand because it misreads her book to say things it isn't saying. This happens because it misunderstands Rand's use of metaphor or her bad writing for the positions she's actually articulating. Again, I'm not a fan of Rand, so my interest here isn't in defending Objectivism. I'm just not a fan of bad criticisms.

To pick a trivial example, Rand absolutely is not saying that is Ok to kill people who can't make up their minds. It's just Rand's way of arguing that the capacity for rational choice is what makes humans moral agents who are different from animals. Therefore, people who refuse to take responsibility for themselves in making choices and abrogate their choices to authorities are behaving immorally / like animals. She combines this with the cliches of a spy thriller. It's dubious writing, but she is absolutely not endorsing killing the indecisive. That's a sloppy misreading of her at best and a deliberate misleading at worst.

Rand sucks, but it's important to get the reasons why right.

Her real life hero was a serial murderer.
SEE Back in the late 1920s, as Ayn Rand was working out her philosophy, she became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation. Rand filled her early notebooks with worshipful praise of Hickman. According to biographer Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market, Rand was so smitten with Hickman that she modeled her first literary creation -- Danny Renahan, the protagonist of her unfinished first novel, The Little Street -- on him.

[_subgenius]

Could we turn your interlocution around on you Subgenius and ask how greed is good?

sure, why not?

Greed, is not solely good nor solely bad.
First let me define what i mean when i say "greed" - in simple terms - greed is an intense and selfish desire for something.
Which seems to imply that greed is simply a level of want, of desire. That perhaps a term such as excess is an important qualifier when considering the moral value of desire.....the object of that desire? can that be relevant to determining whether "greed" is morally good or bad? If one has an intense and selfish desire to be with God, would that be bad-greedy? or good-greedy?...or just not greedy at all?
Nevertheless, for this side-bar I am assuming that greed is an intense form of desire/want and that this form tends to be self-centered in its extreme and thus the way that greed can be good is by how it can be an incentive for a person to work, to start a business, and even to travel to the moon. Yes, a person can be greedy for knowledge and that does not inherently mean that their greed is "bad" does it? If, say, in pursuit of that knowledge the person decides to burden another person(s) either unnecessarily or without just compensation then we might could determine that the greed caused a bad action, but given that this action was a choice....i am not comfortable assuming that "bad" is the only product possible from greedy thoughts.

So, back to being selfish....what particular Christian teaching/scripture gives us a definition and a moral value for selfishness?

[_moksha]

You are stating that good/bad is primarily founded on Christian traditions and teachings. Which seems to imply that atheism shares this foundation? or is there a yet to be revealed foundation for the atheistic tradition with regards to ethics and morality?

Once the Christian value system influenced the ethics of Western Civilization (a secular entity) it would be natural for atheists within our Western Civilization to draw their ethics from the same well. Refraining from murder could, therefore, be a shared ethic of both believers and non-believers. What you need to watch out for are those atheists who draw their code of ethics from eastern Ninjas and would sneak up behind you with their paralytic blows guns and

[_subgenius]

Her real life hero was a serial murderer.
SEE Back in the late 1920s, as Ayn Rand was working out her philosophy, she became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation. Rand filled her early notebooks with worshipful praise of Hickman. According to biographer Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market, Rand was so smitten with Hickman that she modeled her first literary creation -- Danny Renahan, the protagonist of her unfinished first novel, The Little Street -- on him.

when you straight up copy-n-paste from another source you should at least indicate that what you have posted is not you original thought. Maybe by quotes, italics, or even a link to the source
(like you source could have been a direct quote from here - http://www.alternet.org/story/145819/ay ... ial_killer)

She was also addicted to amphetamines, but attacking the messenger is hardly something that gives an argument integrity or intelligence. Like your post here is interesting but is trivial to the topic at hand. The inspiration for her contemplation hardly validates or invalidates that contemplation. Given her history and the historical circumstances he developed within it is not surprising that she would be inspired by how a sociopath's psychology might be applied in non-violent non-psychotic ways/means...as you stated so eloquently in your plagiarized post - she was "working it out"

Are you also condemning the many insightful advances made by the Nazi regime because "Hitler" ?
(like the Volkswagen, film innovations, medicine, and even in clothing - honestly those uniforms were sweet...and don't forget Jesse Owens ran all over Germany wearing Adidas shoes (see Adolf Dassler and his brother)).

[_The CCC]

Close but no cigar.

Whether she was addicted to anything is not a concern of mine. It was between her and her doctor.

Yes the NAZIS did some good. Our interstate highway system is based on their Autobahn. However that misses the point that they did incredible evil too.

Ayn Rand was a sociopath who idealized a Serial Murderer. The model for her John Galt in "Atlas Shrugged".

[_Dr. Shades]

Ayn Rand was a sociopath who idealized a Serial Murderer. The model for her John Galt in "Atlas Shrugged".

Umm, that's not what you yourself copied-and-pasted:

Rand was so smitten with Hickman that she modeled her first literary creation -- Danny Renahan, the protagonist of her unfinished first novel, The Little Street -- on him.

Do you not read the material you plagiarize?

[_The CCC]

He was a continuing model in her books.