Here are some teachings of Ayn Rand as found in "For the New Intellectual".
> "If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it;
Ms. Rand needs to check her premise.
The victim has the power to forgive and the subject has the power to repent. Forgiveness and repentance erase the action, according to a competing theology, which seems to be more consistent with human experience. Barack Obama, the ex-pothead, may be cited as an example. In Ms. Rand's theology humans are either hopelessly doomed or born without animal instincts. She keeps telling us that there is no such thing as human instincts. I don't believe her. Do you? She keeps telling us that perfectly rational men; men able to make the right choices at all times are walking among us. Do you believe that? I don't. Yet her entire philosophy rests squarely on those premises.
> if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral.
True. But he has a will to fight his instincts. We don't have to believe that we are born without animal instincts in order to believe that we can make good moral choices. It's a false alternative.
> To hold, as man's sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality."
Man's will, and his choices, has had the power to change his genetic limitations since the beginning of time. He can transport himself in ten minutes through a distance that would take hours to walk. He has made his voice and images to reach instantly through thousands of miles; he can see tiny things and far away constellations. He can even walk on the moon and come back to tell about it!
Ms. Rand's eloquence and emotion mask the gaping holes in her logic. It is a fact of experience that man has a tendency to do evil, regardless of how evil is defined. It is also true that no man can escape doing evil at some point. But there is such a thing as redemption through repentance,forgiveness and subsequent choices. The Christian model appears to be more in line with reality than the Obectivist model.
On Nov 4, 10:50 pm, acar <acarm...@mail.com> wrote:
> Here are some teachings of Ayn Rand as found in "For the New > Intellectual".
> > "If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it;
> Ms. Rand needs to check her premise.
> The victim has the power to forgive and the subject has the power to > repent. Forgiveness and repentance erase the action, according to a > competing theology, which seems to be more consistent with human > experience.
I think she's more right than you. If a person kills someone then forgiveness and repentance don't change the fact of the murder. And a tendency or temperament towards violence is not created by will, but by nature and external influences.
On Nov 5, 12:13 am, Piet de Arcilla <dearci...@gmail.com> wrote:
Piet, you have an interesting name. Are you Spanish? Arcilla is the Spanish word for a natural earth product very similar to clay. The only other Piet that I know of is a Dutch cubist painter whose last name I don't remember.
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