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Reason vs. faith. A false dichotomy

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Mike82ARP

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I just finished watching the 8 part series on Reason vs Faith by the Ayn Rand Institute with Onkar Ghate and Yaron Brook representing the “reason” side of the argument. I found their arguments typically were predicated on a sophomoric understanding of the Bible (which Ghake tried to use in his arguments- Abraham and Isaac).

They used straw men premises to build the “reason and faith are opposites” conclusions. THere are examples of reason used in the Bible, but it would be pointless to bring them up on this site. Their assumption that Christianity is “mystical” and irrational might be appropriate if one narrowly defines "faith" from a Kierkegaardian philosophy, but that is by no means a universal view in the Christian community. Piekoff’s diatribe in question 6 is almost laughable. Maybe being annoyingly condescending is an effective form of discourse in his mind. I wonder who his rabbi was?

Furthermore, their moral/ethical compass axioms really boils down to relativism.

Although I am impressed and in agreement with Rand’s political and economic philosophies, her positing atheism as integral to objectivism is weak as evidenced by the repeated challenges that part of her philosophy faces. These three- Brook, Ghate, and Peikoff fail to impress me.

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You are refering to

available here?

Further note: I see these are 8 question/answers - offered independently of the lecture it followed? Is the lecture itself available to set the context?

Edited by dream_weaver
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There are plenty of places on the web to talk about capitalism and fellow supporters of it. I'm sure plenty of them are familiar with Rand too and similarly like her economics/politics but want to throw out the prior ideas they came from. Why come here in particular then? I would understand if you were simply interested in gathering information or just curious in general, but that does not seem to be the case when you keep going into threads or making them and jumping into grumpy "You're wrong! Boo!" rather than some kind of simple, "Hey, this doesn't seem to be adding up. Somebody care to fill me in on the Objectivist position and arguments in favor of X?" If you aren't interested in what we have to say on these and are very darn set on it that you are right and we are wrong already about things outside of politics/economics, then if you are also darn set on posting on this particular forum, couldn't you just post in the sections about politics and economics rather than going through the rest of this place continually making threads where you prompt us to post pages and pages of information that has whole books written about it which you are dead set against anyway? If you want to go talk to people about why you think atheism is wrong et cetera, there are other places to do so that do not include in their terms of service agreement that people coming in to promote other ideologies are unwelcome. Heck, you could maybe even try the debate forum here at least to keep these threads contained to one place rather than all over if you would be willing to try inquiry before anger. There's a lot of other things you could do, so why keep going all over here making threads like this?

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her positing atheism as integral to objectivism is weak as evidenced by the repeated challenges that part of her philosophy faces.

Which? I see none in your post - it reads like a movie review, rather than an argument of any kind.

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Like what straw man arguments, what challenges, what bad understandings? GIve us more to work with here. Their argument that Christianity is irrational is not such that there is no reason in the Bible and that all Christians are irrational, but that it is predicated on faith and faith is not a means to knowledge. What other means to knowledge would there be, if the two are a false dichotomy?

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It seems like a few Christian buddies stumbled out of a bar a few weeks ago and decided to go across the road and hassle the Objectivists. What else could explain a post like the OP's which has unsubstantiated opinion after unsubstantiated opinion.

I'm locking this thread too.

Edited by softwareNerd
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