From the teaching of “Intelligent Design” in the classroom to federal prohibition on the funding of stem cell research to the Terri Schiavo case, religion is playing an increasing role in America’s public life. The advocates of religion claim that only religion can restore values to America—by combating moral skepticism and relativism with an absolute view of right and wrong, applicable to everyone. If God is dead, it is often thought today, then everything would be permitted. But does morality rest on religion? Can it rest on religion? Are moral absolutes possible with religion? Without religion? What approach to morality can actually bring values to American culture? These are the questions this talk addresses.

 

Ayn Rand originated a revolutionary code of ethics based on the principle of rational self-interest. Her code views the pursuit of your values—material or spiritual—as noble, and views the act of self-sacrifice as a vice. This talk examines the meaning of this radical morality. Mr. Schwartz explains what genuine selfishness consists of and how it rests, not on indulging in mindless whims, but on embracing the strict guidance of reason. He demonstrates why, under a proper ethics, the moral and the practical are always in harmony. He shows the destructiveness of self-sacrifice and the impossibility of peaceful cooperation among men under the code of altruism. Finally, he discusses why political freedom can ultimately be upheld only if selfishness is recognized as a virtue.

 

Tens of millions have read Ayn Rand’s novels, including The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and half a million copies of her works now sell each year. But far fewer people know of the radical system of ideas underlying the stories she created. Standing alone like her fictional hero Howard Roark, Ayn Rand defied the ideas of more than two millennia by championing individualism, capitalism, egoism and reason.

This lecture by Dr. Onkar Ghate, dean of the Objectivist Academic Center and senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute, introduces some of the main ideas of this controversial thinker—and their vital importance today.

 

"Prevent terrorism by taking care of the poor" (Letters, July 18, 2007)

Islamic terrorists are motivated by their religious ideology, not by any legitimate grievances over "poverty and oppression around the world."

If the terrorists and their leaders had any real interest in overcoming poverty and ending oppression they would be advocating--and fighting for--the establishment of capitalism and the protection of individual rights in their own countries and around the globe.

The Islamists are not interested in freedom or earthly wealth, which they openly despise. Their goal, as they readily admit, is world domination under Islamic law--hardly a recipe for prosperity. Oppression and poverty is not what these fanatics are fighting against--it is what they are fighting to bring about.

 

Religion and Morality


Islamists Are Motivated by Their Beliefs
By Rob Tarr (sent to the Wall Street Journal, July 7, 2007)

It shouldn't require statistical studies to dismiss the myth that "poverty causes terrorism" ("Princeton Economist Says Lack of Civil Liberties, Not Poverty, Breeds Terrorism", July 5, 2007). Equally fallacious is the view, suggested in the article, that political oppression breeds terrorism. Over the past three centuries, poverty and oppression have led millions to seek to immigrate to America--not to blow up its buildings.

The notion that a person's beliefs and actions are determined by his material conditions is stale left-over Marxism. In reality, the fundamental ideas a person accepts determine how he will evaluate the world, and accordingly, how he will act.

Eager immigrants to America desired a better life here on earth, and valued America and its freedom for the chance to achieve that better life. In contrast, Islamists openly tell us that they love death and care nothing for this world. Far from seeing poverty as a negative, Islamists view America's glittering material wealth as a sinful temptation, proof of America's moral corruption.

Far from bristling at political oppression, Islamists proclaim their goal to impose totalitarian Islam on every corner of the earth. The Islamists openly tell us what motivates them to attack us: their religious/philosophical beliefs. Why do we have such a hard time taking them at their word?

 

"What I Think About Evolution" (May 31, 2007), in which Senator Sam Brownback insists that faith is needed to "supplement" reason.

Reason needs no supplement. Faith is not only unnecessary, it is a positively destructive, harmful force.

Only reason provides a method of discovering truths about the world, the truths of nature as well as truths involving "values, meaning and purpose." Anyone who has given thoughtful consideration to Ayn Rand's scientific system of ethics knows that reason answers the questions of morality as readily as it does those of science.

Faith, by contrast, means believing in things precisely when one has no reason to believe--when there are no facts, evidence, logical arguments supporting one's belief. It is not a method for discovering truth, but for evading it in favor of wishes and dogma. The notion that faith can offer any sort of life-sustaining "spiritual" guidance, where reason allegedly fails to do so, is one of the most pernicious Big Lies of our era.

 

began with a large patch of bright, yellow-orange flame shooting sideways from under the base of the rocket. It looked like a normal kind of flame and I felt an instant’s shock of anxiety, as if this were a building on fire. In the next instant the flame and the rocket were hidden by such a sweep of dark red fire that the anxiety vanished: this was not part of any normal experience and could not be integrated with anything. The dark red fire parted into two gigantic wings, as if a hydrant were shooting streams of fire outward and up, toward the zenith—and between the two wings, against a pitch-black sky, the rocket rose slowly, so slowly that it seemed to hang still in the air, a pale cylinder with a blinding oval of white light at the bottom, like an upturned candle with its flame directed at the earth.

 

Then I became aware that this was happening in total silence, because I heard the cries of birds winging frantically away from the flames. The rocket was rising faster, slanting a little, its tense white flame leaving a long, thin spiral of bluish smoke behind it. It had risen into the open blue sky, and the dark red fire had turned into enormous billows of brown smoke, when the sound reached us: it was a long, violent crack, not a rolling sound, but specifically a cracking, grinding sound, as if space were breaking apart, but it seemed irrelevant and unimportant, because it was a sound from the past and the rocket was long since speeding safely out of its reach—though it was strange to realize that only a few seconds had passed. I found myself waving to the rocket involuntarily, I heard people applauding and joined them, grasping our common motive; it was impossible to watch passively, one had to express, by some physical action, a feeling that was not triumph, but more: the feeling that that white object’s unobstructed streak of motion was the only thing that mattered in the universe.

What we had seen, in naked essentials—but in reality, not in a work of art—was the concretized abstraction of man's greatness.

The fundamental significance of Apollo 11’s triumph is not political; it is philosophical; specifically, moral-epistemological.

 

Most citys don't report crime rates because it makes them look bad.

 

these are false truths, a moral person would end human suffering. This is in the Declaration of Independance

 

Prior to the Declaration of Independance blacks and white lived and marryed each other.