NIJamesHughes

This is an article I wrote after my daughter recovered from MRSA. There is also a video for the article if you follow the link. http://wedontneedgod.wordpress.com/2009/09/03/we-dont-need-prayer/ Recently my daughter was in the hospital for a severe case of pneumonia. While she was there, being treated with modern medicine, using the latest advances in science and technology people would tell me an odd thing. They would say “We are praying for her.” While I certainly appreciated the sentiment, which was something like, we feel bad for your situation and wish there was something we could do to help, I couldn’t help thinking, if prayer actually worked, why would she have gotten sick in the first place. Surely there is someone out there praying that innocent children don’t have to suffer needlessly if God can stop it at will. And further, if prayer worked, why did I need to have her at the hospital at all? If god was going to miraculously heal her, you’d think he could do it in my living room, instead of at a state of the art multibillion dollar hospital that specializes in child care. Also, if god has a plan for everything, then it was part of that plan for my daughter to get sick. What makes these people think he would change his plan, god being all powerful and perfect, simply because you asked? God supposedly knows everything anyways; surely he knows you want a baby to recover from an illness. So what is the point of asking? That sentiment in itself didn’t seem too bad until my daughter actually did recover from her illness. Then “God had answered everyone’s prayers.” Never mind the hospital, doctors, nurses, medication, equipment, and the minds of the scientists who had discovered so much about the human body and had invented all these procedures my daughter had undergone to make her well again. To me it seemed that these superstitious people were spitting in the face of the doctors who saved my daughter’s life. It was not their achievement, and an achievement of science that she is alive today. It was because of prayer. It wasn’t because of the people in the hospital who spent a full month working with my daughter, using the scientific method to discover what was wrong with her, and then applying technology developed through scientific discovery. It’s not right that religious people should belittle those doctors by crediting the results of their studies and labor to prayer. The truth is we didn’t need prayer for my daughter to get better. We didn’t need God at all. We needed the power of the human mind and the achievements of science.

So am I. It would have been presumptive and insulting.

Ah, I see those now, thank you.

Thanks for your reply, but I don't need a lesson in what axiom's are, so I fear your words are wasted, and you have contributed nothing to the list of axioms.

Not true. Volition: http://www.peikoff.com/opar/volition.htm "The principle of volition is a philosophic axiom, with all the features this involves." Validity of the senses: Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Leonard Peikoff, page 39: "The validity of the senses is an axiom"

I am trying to list all axiomatic concepts. Existence Identity Consciousness Volition Validity of the Senses are there more?

Why don't you find it convincing?

Just wanted to share this article, and perhaps clarify any of the points if folks have any questions.

http://wedontneedgod.wordpress.com/2010/03...gious-concepts/

Your items are no longer listed on ebay... do you still have any for sale?

Your welcome, I'm glad to help ;-)

Just for reference, George Reisman touches on Rothbard's meetings with Miss Rand in the introduction to "Capitalism: A treatise on economics" avaliable for free at capitalism.net

Does that apply to any philosophy as long as the conclusion follows logical from its premises, even if they are wrong premises? Such as if some mistakenly thought that the earth existed for its own sake and became an environmentalist or if they thought men where not smart or moral enough to self-govern and became a statist and logically followed from those premises to level that PETA and Nazis are? What I mean is that I thought an argument couldn't be described as rational unless the premises and the conclusion where correct. "if A is true then B follows, A is true thus B follows" That would be a valid argument. Its logical, because it proceeds from a true premise to a true conclusion and is therefore rational. But I don't under stand how one could say that using a process of non contradictory identification to proceed from an invalid premise to an invalid conclusion is an example of rationality. Unless, the fact that the method of non contradictory identification was used is essential in determining rationality, not the truth of the premise and the conclusion. Is that the case?

The group is called "The Association of Objectivists in Business," here is their web-site http://www.aob.biz/

I would like to commission two essays at the price of $20 per essay. The topic of the first essay is to be the Objectivism's defense of atheism on metaphysical grounds. There should be a focus on the axioms of existence and their incompatibility to the concept of 'god.' The topic of the first essay is to be the Objectivism's defense of atheism on epistemological grounds. There should be an emphasis on the arguement from faith and reason's dismissal of it, as well as a paragraph or so on the nature of reason and mans need of it. Both essays should be written with an audience of atheists in mind, but requiring no prior knowledge of objectivism. The purpose of the essays will be placement on a website that shows that Objectivism is the only consistent basis of atheism and will serve as an Objectivist outreach program to atheists. The essays do not have to come from the same author, feel free to submit articles for one or both catagories. Please send your essay's for consideration to [email protected] Payment: Payment for the selected articles will be made by money-order upon approval PS Feel free to email or PM me with any questions or considerations.

Apparently because of the kind of "exiles," "banishments," and "excommunications" that Solo says ARI is guilty of the group has broken up into, as far as I can tell, three other organizations. They are SoloPassion, Rebirth of Reason, and Objectivist Living. That is one sure sign of kooks: their groups are always short lived.

I really dislike John Kasich ( from "Heartland" on Fox. A while back a woman was on his show condeming the Republican party for its lack of integrity to its own principles. She wrote a book on the topic. All John said was "well, consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," and she said "yeah, thats true." It makes me wonder why she wrote the book at all.

Does this help? "2. Isn't evolution just a theory that remains unproven?" "In science, a theory is a rigorously tested statement of general principles that explains observable and recorded aspects of the world. A scientific theory therefore describes a higher level of understanding that ties "facts" together. A scientific theory stands until proven wrong -- it is never proven correct. The Darwinian theory of evolution has withstood the test of time and thousands of scientific experiments; nothing has disproved it since Darwin first proposed it more than 150 years ago. Indeed, many scientific advances, in a range of scientific disciplines including physics, geology, chemistry, and molecular biology, have supported, refined, and expanded evolutionary theory far beyond anything Darwin could have imagined. " From PBS http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/faq/cat01.html#Q02

Thanks for the reply, David, and I will look for more journals to search. In the mean time I did find a source of "Objectivist Scholarship" with a lot of articles. I don't recognize most of the names, a notable exception is Diana Hsieh. Some of the titles I looked at cover all of OPAR, ITOE, and BBTC. http://enlightenment.supersaturated.com/essays/essays.html

I was reading a book last night and browsed the bibliography and noticed a journal called "the journal of consciousness studies," and I thought, "Wow, that would be a great place for Objectivist's to really show their stuff in regards to epistemology." I started to search the net and found that there are journals for ever branch of philosophy. Most of the ones I found even want you to submit books for them to review. Here is a list of scholarly journals http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/ lets all suggest they review Ayn Rand's book for that field, and encourage Objectivist writers to submit their works.

as far as her philosophy did not match reality, due to whatever error, couldn't the philosophy be called irrational? Or if you use false information to come to a false conclusion using a process of logic, that could be mistaken but not irrational? i'm not trying to be hard headed here, i really just don't understand what is meant by her statement, so i apologize in advance if it seems like I just want to argue about it.

*** Mod's note: Merged with a similar topic. - sN *** After following the recent debate in this paper concerning evolution, I am amazed by how little the opponents of evolution actually know about it. What amazes me even more is that they would wish to flaunt this lack of knowledge to the whole world with statements such as "If evolutions really happened why are there still monkeys?" The fact that evolution states that humans and other modern primates are cousins and descended from a common ancestor, not one from the other, is readily available information. In light of the fact that there is no lack of information available on evolution on the Net, there can only be two reasons why people who wish to debate evolution are not properly educated about it. One is willful ignorance and the second is that they don't know where to look. Of course nothing can be done about the first, as the old cliché goes, one can lead a horse to water but can not make him drink; So, I will address the second possibility. www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution provides information on, to name a few, the fossil record, transitional forms of animals, the evolution of the eye, case studies of animals, and many videos. There is FAQ that includes the answers to questions like "Did we evolve from monkeys?", "Isn't evolution just a theory that remains unproven?", and "What is "intelligent design," and is it science?" The National Academies (www.nationalacademies.org) also provides reports, statements and research papers on evolution. If the opponents of evolution were to research just the two aforementioned websites they would find that evolution is supported with volumes of experimental evidence and that intelligent design has “not yet been subjected to the normal process of scientific experimentation and debate, nor have they been accepted by the scientific community.”

In "The Art of Fiction" book, Miss Rand say that Dominique's philosophy is mistaken, but not irrational. How is that possible?

An Atheist Brian Flemming who organized the dvd promoted on this website www.thegodmovie.com was on the Alan Colmes show last night. He has "declared war on christmas" and is passing out this dvd to people on the street. He praised the book "the end of faith" and spoke of reason and irrationality so I called in. I told him that I liked what he was doing and that I would like to see Christianity go the way of other religious myths like the greek and egyptian religions, and that if it was going to happen it would take Ayn Rands philosophy of Objectivism to take our culture to that place. He said "aww, and it was going so well" Alan said "you don't agree with the Ayn Rand thing?" and he (Brian) said " i...i...don'know" they didn't say anything else about it but I thought it was strange that an atheist who is concerned about reason and unreason in our culture doesn't like Ayn Rand. Maybe there needs to be an Athiest out reach group, to educate atheist about objectivism and get them interested in it. you can listen to it here, but the question and answer period isn't on the recording: http://www.foxnews.com/alancolmesradio/

I was looking at the LP website for arkansas and noticed a link to ARI in the links section, and It made me think "there may be hope for them after all." I have read "LTPOL" by Peter Schwartz and I agree with the article. What I am curious about is if you have a group of people who are interested in liberty, but have no philosophic basis for that liberty, if a person a a group of people with in that group can refute the mistaken premise AND provide a proper foundation for the idea of liberty won't the Objectivist's win? Ayn Rand said that in a compromise between two parties with the same ideas the most consistent will win. Arn't Objectivists the most consistent defenders and promoters of Liberty? I understand that capitalism has had defenders whose philosophy was not consistent with capitalism yet we still use that word and work to defend it.