Self Made Soul

I can see his original decision to get involved in meth cooking to be a moral choice based on the fact that he is pursuing what he considers to be his only method of survival, based on what he knows at the time. However, every single decision he has made since his cancer went into remission has allowed him to fall into being a nihilistic monster. He's quickly becoming the person that he hated to deal with when he first got into cooking meth.

Like Jennifer, my Facebook page erupted as well. In my case, it was the first significant mention of any of this. I guess I dont troll the CNN/MSNBC/Fox News circuit enough, but I generally consider that a good thing. Is there any where that I can see an objective listing of all the critical points of evidence? Wikipedia looks pretty solid on it, but I dont trust it looking at it so soon after the verdict. Thanks!

Welcome Phoenix! Your story sounds very familiar to me. I originally came from a Libertarian background, and I had no knowledge of Philosophy as I considered it to be a useless subject. Around the age of 24 I began reading Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead for the first time. I read it as mainly a blueprint for society, and I considered the portions that concerned the ethics of personal relationships to be, well, "filler". At this time I claimed to like Rand, but I didn't call myself an objectivist. Perhaps I simply didn't want to. Like you, as I encountered more and more irrational people, I began noticing familiar patterns that made me think of characters in Atlas Shrugged. For instance, my brother-in-law IS James Taggart right down to the way he phrases his speech. After I became a father for the first time, I began thinking about what sort of moral code I would teach my son. Knowing that he would encounter irrational family, whether it is his nihilist uncle or his altruist (Baptist AND Socialist.... /shudder) grandmother, I wanted to prepare him to understand what is wrong with their thinking. With the AS movie coming up, I thought about picking up Atlas Shrugged again, and this time specifically looking for inspiration for a moral code. This time, upon reading it, I was absolutely floored. When I look back at my passing interest in Rand from before, it seems like I didn't understand it. When there was something that I had an issue with, it was because I was judging it by a conventional morality. When I judged it by my morality, it all made sense. And then the world started making more sense. It was then that I chose to live my life by my own moral code. I'm fairly new here as well, but nonetheless I welcome you!

Welcome!

Hey all, thanks for the welcome. Eioul, thanks! I've read Anthem, but only a part of We the Living and The Fountainhead is coming up next on my reading list. I have an upcoming vacation, and I'm going to try to knock out TF, Capitalism, and TRM while sitting on the beach.

Hah! Yeah, little gems like that are amusing, indeed. In my days as a Christian teenager I told myself that items like that were acceptable because of the vastly different culture. All of this happened about 20 years ago, and from what I remember it was more that what I perceived as truly amazing in the world did not seem to have any reference in the Bible. It was like the things that I had learned to value in my life were rejected by the Bible. When I had to chose to go with what I was told to believe rather than what I perceived, then, well, I'm here aren't I?

Hey everybody, I've been lurking for a couple of weeks, and its time to make an account. My name is Chris and I'm an objectivist from the metro Atlanta area. From my bio: The first time I read Atlas Shrugged, I was a conservative and I saw it as a guide for economics. The second time I read Atlas Shrugged, I was a libertarian and I saw it as a guide for politics. The third time I read Atlas Shrugged, I was an objectivist, and I saw it as a guide for living. So that's my cute poetic way of saying that I started off as a libertarian, and after wrestling with several things that didn't mesh in my world view (Intellectual Property, for one), after going back to Objectivism I'm finding more and more that this is how I have always seen the world, I just didn't have the word(s) for it. As I go back and study facets of Objectivism I had glossed over or even dismissed earlier, I'm finding that the reason for it was that I didn't really understand it. I never took a philosophy class in college (or at least in the time that I stayed in college before I decided to become a productive individual instead), mainly because I didn't think that it had anything to offer me. I was wrong. THEIR philosophy had nothing to offer me. I stumbled onto this forum through a couple of different avenues: Google search for Objectivist parenting (I have a 1-yr old whom I want to help be a rational individualist) and from Dr. Hsieh's podcast notification. I'm finding that for people such as myself, who never had a traditional philosophical instruction, the newer methods of communicating Objectivist activism are much better for getting me to see past the worldview handed to me by the comprachicos (I was raised in a religious & socialist family). Without any friends or family who are objectivist, there really wasn't anything that helped me put things in context tn years ago, like I have access to now. I hope to be a part of the conversation, and thank you all for providing such an awesome resource as this. Thanks!

I was raised in a Southern Baptist household (mother was religious/collectivist, dad was from the church of NASCAR ). I assumed a belief in christianity as a teenager, but I discovered my atheism around the time that I completed my first complete read-through of the NIV of The Bible.