Chops

I sport a few Atlas Shrugged Themed shirts, two "Rearden Steel" shirts, and two "Taggart Transcontinental" shirts. I think they're all from JohnGaltGifts.com

Well, I started as a catholic (childhood and early teen years), but after several years of thinking, I slowly abandoned it, and a few years after I abandoned religion altogether, was when my girlfriend recommended Atlas Shrugged to me. So I wasn't ALWAYS of these principles. Or maybe my philosophy was what lead me to abandon religion to begin with. So I wasn't ALWAYS "objectivist", but I was so at least before being formally introducted to Objectivism.

My girlfriend read Atlas Shrugged for a scholarship essay contest, and while reading it, kept saying "This book IS YOU, you MUST read it." I knew nothing of Rand before this. Afterword, she read the Fountainhead, Anthem, and We the Living, all the while pestering me to read Atlas Shrugged. After a year or two of pestering, I finally picked it up, and sure enough, it described my philosophy using words I've never been able to form myself.

Not exactly. Someone mentioned the prophecies in the bible as "proof" of the bible's accuracy, and generally speaking, every prophecy in the bible is fulfilled in the bible. That's just circular reasoning, but because my opponent is just a "cut and paste" christian without any real capabilities of arguing, I decided to do the research myself, and any bit of evidence for christianity seems to hinge upon the dead sea scrolls, and the prophecies contained therein. Unfortunately, no. I don't know the contents of the Scrolls well enough, nor the Bible, so I do admit to ignorance in this matter. This is why I'm looking for specific prophecies contained in the scrolls. Because they contain large parts of the old testament, surely they'd contain at least a few prophecies which can be demonstrated true or not. And while I agree with much of Q's comments, I do tend to disagree with some of them to a degree though. Certainly, mixing fantasy in with truth does not validate anything. While I agree that coincidence != truth, if the statistical chances are remote enough, perhaps there might be some credibility to it. I'm not referring to the prophecies of things where someone could easily "fulfill the prophecy" themselves, but to major things, like the destruction of cities, earthquakes, etc.. If someone managed to make 10,000 prophecies and 1 or 2 came true, yeah, not worth the effort, and hardly the inspired word of God. But if someone made 10 or 12 major prophecies and those turned out to come 100% true against incredible statisical probability (like 1 in 1020 for example), I'd be willing to lend at least some credibility to the source. At this point I'm hardly convinced of God or Religion, but I find this Dead Sea Scrolls thing as a bit of a roadblock for future debates.

It's not uncommon to get into debates with Christians in which all of their justifications ultimately circle back to "The bible says so." As such, it's not difficult to beat that logic (or rather, lack thereof). I am faced, however, with a bit of a pickle. The "Dead Sea Scrolls," believed to be dating to around 600BC, are used for validating the bible (more specifically, Biblical prophecies). The general argument against the Bible is that "Prophecies made in the Bible come true in the Bible", thus a circular reference, and an easy to defeat logical breakdown. My concern, here, is that if the texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls (written earlier) contain prophecies which undeniably came true, validated elsewhere, then arguing against Christianity, Judaism, or Islam becomes rather difficult, as there is more than just "The Bible." One of the claims is that the prophecies in the Bible are explicit and happen with 100% accuracy, vs the vague prophecies of Nostradamus and others, whose prophecies "sorta" happen. If this is true, there must be some point-by-point of each prophecy and where it happened, validated by sources outside of the Bible. I'm curious, then, if there is any information about the validated age of the Dead Sea Scrolls, if they have been found to be forgeries, or if the prophecies contained therein are only validated in the Bible (as opposed to being validated in other recorded history), or if the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves do not actually contain any of the prophecies, thereby invalidating any proof. I've been browsing the web for a few days looking for something to invalidate them (not being a Biblical or Historical Scholar, I can't exactly directly work on this problem), and I've so far discovered very little in the ways of invalidating these documents. Is there any reference you know of that breaks these arguments, or is there something perhaps I'm missing that can lead to logically refuting these? I'm kind of at a loss here. This seems to be the one semi-real shred of evidence that the major world religions have (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all claim they validate their claims). A prophecy that can be proven to be made 500 years before it happened makes for difficult-to-ignore statistical evidence, I guess.

Very effective counter to the victim mentality that went into the naming of the newspaper.

It is a pretty arbitrary word, as David pointed out. Personally, I'd define it as "Acquiring more than you've earned" where what "you've earned" being defined at that point where in order to acquire more, you must violate someone else's rights. I would not consider "Greed" to be wanting to keep what you've earned through moral means. So, in answer to David's statement of "How much do you deserve?" is really defined as that threshold where you go from "respecting the rights of others" to "violating the rights of others."