Leaderboard

I should have considered resurrection They are hardly “Generalized Interpretations”. When I say essentials I mean just that – Remove the concretes and integrate the common essentials. Religion, as a type of mysticism, has common essentials to it. Kelly and Peikoff do not dispute the essentials of Objectivism, like the idea of knowledge being objective, but dependent abstractions that come later in ethics (objective judgment) for example, much like religion disputes interpretations. Appeals of authority are certainly not exclusive to religion but they are an essential factor of religion, defined by religion itself, since individual knowledge is impossible at best or a corruption at worse. Christianity goes out of its way in fact in the very first book of the Bible to claim man is bad because he gained knowledge instead of being a passive obedient animal in God’s private garden. Nor is that a parable since the whole point of the crucifixion is to claim Jesus died to atone for the sin of me having knowledge and disobeying God. As for revelations, religion does require revelation, not necessarily that from the God(s) but still an outside source effectively revealing knowledge somehow since man is not to understand existence but merely observe like a passive mirror and reflect what is given to him. At last if he wants to be good he has to do this. Thinking = bad while obeying = Good. Whether it is a voodoo priest rolling the bones to predict the future or a priest telling me that I cannot think about the Bible but just “believe it on faith”, it is a revelation since the source is something above nature, above me, and above my mind. I hope that clarifies the point.

... or resurrected, depending on your POV I think mdegges point isn't rebutted by listing general interpretations; various interpretations (including yours) remain. Generalities might be given about Objectivism as a whole that individual Objectivists (or those from the Kelly camp vs those from the Peikoff camp) could and do regularily argue on this forum. Appeals to authority (divine or otherwise) aren't exclusive to persons of faith. The primary difference between Christianity and other religions has to do with the issue of revelation, which I think was effectively rebutted by Thomas Paine in The Age of Reason.

This seems a good place to bring up the Dudley letter again. http://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=22400&#entry281408 Yet the early Christian communities were certainly communistic. See the Acts of the Apostles, and especially note the part where someone sells some of their property then fails to hand over all the proceeds to the group. But ultimately the tenets of Christianity are vague enough to permit many interpretations.