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Re: most influential
Michael Cade wrote:
> > Then we might have to knock a point off the Bible's score for Ayn Rand,
> > although I suppose no one said the influence had to be *positive*...
>
> What is that supposed to mean?
Nothing mysterious. Just that Ayn Rand was so virulantly anti-religion in
general, and anti-christian in particular, that I joked that she should count
against the bible, in contrast to people like C. S. Lewis, who were positively
influenced by the bible. Rand's philosophy of power, reason, and the
individual is diametrically opposed to Jesus's "help the weak" approach; she
would have no trouble simply letting the mediocre, uncreative, and incompetant
simply die. John Galt's utopia is a far cry from Jesus's Kingdom of Heaven.
Jesus welcomed the dregs of society to his table, and told people to sell what
they have and give it to the poor. Rand would have no charity, as it weakens
the individual (in her view). Those who dedicate themselves to helping others
are vampires that feed on the helplessness of those they are trying to help and
get off on feeling superior and sanctimonious. Ironically, for all her
rhetoric about free reason and anti-hierarchical-authority, the objectivist
society she set up was a total cult of personality in which her word was law.
But I digress...
So, since much of her writing is explicitly set up to contradict or undermine
Jesus's teachings, I thought perhaps she should count against people like
C. S. Lewis, who are writing to support and spread Christian ethics/ideals
(although technically, "the Bible" could also apply to Judaism, it's been used
in an exclusively Christian context so far, so that's the context in which I
was referring to it). Then it occured to me that the question of "most
influential" doesn't necessarily mean "positively influential", which is the
way most people were answering the question. You could argue that Hitler and
Stalin were two of the most influential people of the 20th century, simply by
the sheer number of people whose lives were changed and affected (or ended) by
their actions. So clearly Rand was *influenced* by the Bible, although that
influence was negative, in that she felt moved to reject it.
That's all I meant...
--
Don Smith Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
donaldas at umich_edu http://xte.mit.edu/~dasmith/
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are
to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile,
but is morally treasonable to the American public." - Theodore Roosevelt
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