redfarmer

You've got the right attitude already! One of the virtues of Objectivism is independence of thought. Never, never, never take someone else's word for it.

You're making a bold, sweeping statement here. Please back it up with evidence. I am not familiar with Honey, but to give an example, one of my good friends who is gay decided in his late teens that, since it was possible for him to have sex with a woman, he must be straight. So, he married a woman and together they had a son. However, he was completely miserable throughout his marriage and realized that he was gay, that nothing had changed. He put his wife through school so she would be able to support herself on her own and then divorced her. He tells me he's never been happier than when he finally accepted himself. Even if sexuality is psychologically determined, you have yet to present evidence that psychologists are in any position in the current state of psychological medicine to "treat" homosexuality. In fact, the only form of therapy for homosexuality, reparative therapy, is almost universally accepted by psychologists and medical practitioners to be ineffective and dangerous (many people who go through reparative therapy end up worse off than before). You are also ignoring the possibility that Honey could be bisexual. I doubt that you know her and could ask her if she is still attracted to men or if she was attracted to women while she was married. Unless you know the facts in her case, please do not use her as an example. I would agree with you 100% that the decision to act upon or not act upon your sexuality is entirely volitional. What I do not see you proving is that the drive itself is volitional. Believe me, if it were possible to change your sexuality under our current level of understanding of the subject, I would be straight today. However, I am absolutely 100% unequivocally not attracted to women sexually despite the effort I put into attempting to change in my teenage years. I spent so much time and money on the subject in an attempt to change but all I ended up doing was plunging myself into a deep dark pit of depression which I am only now emerging from. Please, please, please, never try to tell a homosexual that he can change if he only tries hard enough. If that were possible, I doubt there would be very many gay people left in the world.

I believe you'll find the answer to your question in Nathaniel Branden's essay, "Isn't Everyone Selfish?" in The Virtue of Selfishness.

Zak, I think you meant the racism article in The Virtue of Selfishness. I believe the same article is also reprinted in Return of the Primitive.

I went through an intensely painful psychological period in my life in my late teens and early 20s. I was constantly depressed and thinking about killing myself. Why? I was gay and God hated homosexuals. When I started asking questions to my fellow Christians, they kept feeding me bs which amounted to, "trust God and he'll take away your pain and your homosexuality over time." I could not understand why, if God was as powerful as he claimed to be and as benevolent as he said he was and as all knowing as he said he was, God could look at me, feel my pain, and make me prolong my suffering if he could take it away instantly just to teach me something. (That was their answer when I questioned why an all powerul God couldn't take away something instantly.) Then they would feed me the line that "God doesn't give us a greater burden to bear than he knows we can handle." Well, I knew this was bs. If it were true, nobody would kill themselves. God sure was sounding like a manevolent bastard at this point. I was confused and didn't know what to believe. I was ready to try and reconcile my beliefs with the fact that I was homosexual. I did a search on Yahoo! for a church that accepted homosexuals and accidentally came across the web page of an agnostic. Her arguements challenged my beliefs for the first time in my life. After that, I started reading everything I could read, starting with Bertrand Russell's Why I am Not A Christian. Within a short amount of time, I was finally understanding things. The fact that all of the Christians I was talking to were giving me bs answers for the arguments I was reading didn't help much.("Trust in God. We may not understand but He doees.") So, in July of 2000, I renounced Christianity and began seeking my path elsewhere. At first I considered myself agnostic but quickly realized how illogical that stance was.

I'd be most curious to find out what you think the "(whatever else)" is. Speaking for myself, I had no attraction to anything prior to puberty. I was a naive child and that's the way that my parents liked it, so I taught myself everything I needed to know about sex and learned the rest from my first girl (yes, girl) friend. There was nothing to implicitly grasp for me before puberty because I wasn't attracted to anyone, man or woman. You do realize you're attacking a straw man here don't you? Statistics don't determine metaphysical validity. The fact that gay people are a small part of the overall population is beside the point. If there was one lonely guy who had a defective gene which caused him to be gay, would it be "metaphysically valid" in your view since he was the only one? (Disclaimer on last paragraph: I am still not fully endorsing the "homosexual gene" theory. The purpose of the last paragraph was simply to show it is impossible to determine metaphysical validity by statistics.) Well, there could be two obvious reasons why there have been gay people througout the entire history of man: 1. Homosexuality is a biological defect seen in a small population all througout history. 2. Homosexuality is a psychological defect seen in a small population all througout history. Now, the fact that it is present in such a small population either way may be the reason the trait has survived for so long. Under Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection, a species whose population was majority homosexual woulld obviously fade away within a few generations. However, the fact that gay people constitute such a small percentage of the population keeps humans alive and, thus, for whatever reason, gay people consistantly appear throughout history in a small minority of the population. What that reason is still needs to be determined by a scientist.

To expand on JMeganSnow's comments with an analogy, you wouldn't expect to understand quantum mechanics by studying basic Newtonian physics would you? Why do you want to understand a complicated philisophical issue before you have studied the philosophy as a whole (or at least the relevant portions)?

That article was reprinted in its entirety in the Louisville Courier-Journal Sunday, along with quotes from journalist Mike Wallace and Kentucky Governor Ernie Fletcher on Ayn Rand. The ironic part is that, just a few days earlier, the same newspaper had published an op-ed by Harry Binswanger on the Ten Commandments.

I used to live with a guy who took the movie very seriously (as did many of his friends). The sad thing is that he had read Anthem and Atlas Shrugged and he's still pro-left while trying to integrate Rand into his leftist philosophy.

I've been immersing myself in Jazz lately since I have almost completely ignored the genre in the past. I have a good friend who used to be the onboard historian on the steamboat Delta Queen so he's been telling me a lot of the history of Jazz and getting me really interested in all of it (apparently Jazz spread during the early part of the 20th century by steamboats). I just picked up Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" last night and I love it! It features John Coltrane on tenor sax before anyone knew who Coltrane was. Wonderful, wonderful stuff! In the Classical category, has anyone else ever heard of Joshua Bell? I just picked up one of his violin albums and he does some wonderful interpretations of Brahms and Tschichaosky among others.

That was indeed my essential question. If I was not clear in it the first time, I apologize. I conceed that I misunderstood what you wrote the first time around. I can see upon another reading of your previous post that is not what you meant to imply. I agree that we are born tabula rosa. What I don't agree with--at least not at this point--is that sexuality originates with value judgements and emotions. I never said that straight people were exempt from this theory. I was simply trying to bring up the point that many have ignored straight people in forming theories about the origins of homosexuality. Is it really quite necessary for you to make insinuations about the amount of thought I put into a reply just because I misunderstood you? In summary, I still don't see that we're doing anything in this thread other than forming generalized theories. No one has provided any evidence from either biology or psychology to support their claims and I'm doubt there's much evidence to be found. As for philisophical basis for sexual theories, Leonard Peikoff, in OPAR, asked Ayn Rand what philosophy had to say about sex. She replied, "That it is good." She considered her own opinions about homosexuals to be outside the realm of philosophy. So do I. I don't claim to know the answers but I'm waiting for someone to show me evidence which backs their claims up. Whether it sounds like it or not, this thread is helping me clear up some confusion about sexuality.

That's not what I said at all. Of course straight people are affected by their environment. The question was: what makes straight people straight?

The question I would have is: if being straight is "normal" but being gay requires a psychological trigger during a young age, why doesn't being straight require a psychological trigger as well? It doesn't follow and it doesn't make any logical sense. Frankly, I think we're jumping the gun on making assumptions before enough scientific data is in. If the evidence shows homosexuality to be psychological, I will accept that and go on with my life. I want to see the evidence, though, instead of a bunch of half baked evidence.

I'll admit that I could be biased since I am a gay man, but I have a hard time believing that something as fundamental as my sexuality could have been chosen, even on a subconscious level, early in my life. I remember having gay feelings as early as age eight and, previous to that, I believed, naively, that sex was a synonym for kissing. I'm reserving judgement for now because I'm not qualified to make such a judgement as I'm not a biologist or a psychologist. However, from my personal experience, I tend to lean towards thinking it's more biological than psychological. Something that it seems few people have considered to this point is: what if the "cause" of homosexuality varies from person to person? In some people, it could be psychological while in others it could be genetic.

He never said you were a newbie to life or anything else. What he said was:

What are you talking about? God is never mentioned in the Constitution in any way.

When I opened my copy of the Louisville Courier-Journal today, I started reading an editorial on the Ten Commandments cases going to the Supreme Court. Given the newspaper's usual stances, I expected to read some bull story from a religious zealot. As I continued reading, I thought to myself that this person sure sounds like an Objectivist. So, I look at the author of the editorial and imagine my suprise when I discovered it was Harry Binswanger! The editorial can be found here. It's interesting to note that, in his mini-bio, it is mentioned that Kentucky's governor, Ernie Fletcher, is an "admirer" of Ayn Rand.

To quote Dr. Leonard Peikoff, Ayn Rand's intellectual heir: And to quote Dr. Peikoff one more time:

I guess I should ask: why on earth would you believe the philosophy is "complete?" Ayn Rand never claimed this. Leonard Peikoff never claimed this. No Objectivist intellectual that I've ever heard of has claimed this. Implicit in the statement, "Objectivism is complete," is the statement "There is nothing further to learn in philosophy." THIS is a dogmatic approach, the same approach as the dean had to architecture in The Fountainhead. If I really believed this, there would be no reason for me to be considering studying philosophy in school. Please support your statement that Objectivism is a "complete" system. The fact that Ayn Rand defined essentials in every major branch of philosophy does not make it complete by any means.

I agree with everything you have said in the preceding paragraphs. However, whether you like it or not, your statements to the effect of trying to anticipate your aquaintances' psychological evasions in order to not offend them with the truth is psychologizing (or at least you sure make it sound a lot like it). Do you or do you not tell them the truth? That is the fundamental question here. If you are unable to say why you don't like Dr. Kenner and Dr. Locke, then please withdraw your statement. I will not accept the statment that you do not like them just because and don't ask you for specifics. Any science is open to error. Philosophy exsists to correct that error. The fact that there are Objectivists in the field should be of some hope. Nobody said you were trying to offer them therapy. No one said, either, that you shouldn't try to get them to introspect. However, the fundamental question here is, if the person asked you the question point blank, what are you going to tell them? The truth or a lie? No one would discourage you from practicing introspection or encouraging others to practice introspection.

Objectivism doesn't say anything about psychology because Objectivism is a philosophy, not psychology. Psychology is a specialized field. Philosophy tells psychology how to conduct its work but not the conclusions to draw. Have you read Ayn Rand's essay "The Psychology of Psychologizing" in The Voice of Reason? It sounds to me like you're psychologizing your acquaintances too much. Their evasions are, in fact, not your problem. If they ask a question and don't like the answer, that is their problem, not yours. I don't understand what you mean by "psychology work based on Objectivism." If you mean psychologists who are also Objectivists, then there are plenty of those around, most notably Dr. Ellen Kenner, Dr. Michael J. Hurd, Dr. Edwin Locke, and Dr. Jonathan Rossman. The type of psychology practiced most often among Objectivists is cognitive therapy. If you are not a psychologist, then quit trying to psychologize your friends. You are not trained to do so and can actually cause more harm than good. All you are qualified to analyze is what they actually said and what they actually did. Agreed, but there are alternatives to the current trend of psychotherapy, such as cognitive therapy. Once again, Objectivism, as a philosophy, cannot tell us anything about psychology other than how to obtain our knowledge. If you really want to advance the science of psychology, go back to school and get a degree in psychology. Then you'll be qualified to perform as much research as you want.

Three of the primary qualities that I've often seen ascribed to God (especially among Christians and Jews) are omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence. However, these three qualities are contradictory to each other. Here's why: -God cannot be all powerful if he is all knowing since, by knowing everything that is to come, his own fate is prewritten and, by knowing what it is already, he is powerless to stop his own fate. -God cannot be omnibenevolent if he is all knowing and all powerful. If he knew that disasters such as the Holacaust and 9/11 were going to happen and did nothing to stop them, that makes him sadistic. If he is all powerful, he could have stopped the disasters from happening and saved millions of lives. The "it was God's will" argument is a cop out that theists use when they don't want to face the fact that their god is sadistic in light of this evidence. As such, the primary three attributes ascribed to the Judeo-Christian God are contradictory in nature. In fact, the concept of God is a conglamarate of various attributes that people through history have assumed would be the best attributes in man. If you want to watch a theist squirm, ask them to define God and don't let them settle on the cop out defintion, "the creator of the universe" or "my Father."

Oh I wasn't aware of that. It's been a while since I read the introduction and I thought that since the lectures the book was based on were approved by and participated in by Ayn Rand, they were a part of Objectivism. I stand corrected.

That's not what they're saying at all. If you think about it that way, then all of Objectivism should be a part of Aristotle's philosophy since it mainly built upon Aristotle's metaphysics, epistemology, and theics. Why is it not? Because Aristotle has been dead a very long time and he did not say nor think any of the philosophy of Objectivism. Ayn Rand once said she only called her philosophy "Objectivism" because people were starting to call it "Randism" and she did not like that term. You would not dream of adding to Aristotle's philosophy. Why would you dream of adding to Ayn Rand's philosophy? That's the essensce of David Kelley's "open Objectivism" stance. If you have not read it, you may want to read Leonard Peikoff's essay, Fact and Value It deals with the open and closed system Objectivism arguements.

Objectivism is defined as the philosophy of Ayn Rand. No one can add anything to Objectivism that Ayn Rand did not approve. Thus, the only books not by her which are considered a part of Objectivism are OPAR, because she approved of and was part of the lectures the book was based on, and The Ominous Parallels, because Ayn Rand read and fully approved of the book before she died. Any other works are the works of those authors and do not add to Objectivism. They either clarify issues of Objectivism or add to the author's philosophy.