BreathofLife

When you use the word "rationalize" it implies that you're trying to make something rational that is not rational. Otherwise you'd be "reasoning". the fact that you used the word rationalize there is interesting... My only other question to you regarding faith: Surely this "God" didn't pop out of nowhere. In answer to the question "who (or what) created God?" I've heard many christians say that God is eternal. If you can believe that a "God" is eternal then why can you not believe that the universe itself is eternal and therefore didn't need to be created: it just existed. Always has, always is, and always will be and that the organization the universe exhibits is a product of it's laws and how it has evolved over the years. By it's definition, objectivism HAS to be atheist in nature. You must accept what is and what you know. Reason is NOT compatible with faith.

Have you noticed that evil usually disguises itself in the robes of Good? It makes sense then that those same people would try to make irrationality seem rational. It's because they are evil yet they know that man is a rational being and any man who actualizes his potential to be rational, seeks the Good.

Depends on what meaning of "believe" you use. When I use the word "believe" I usually use one of these two definitions: 1) To accept as true or real. 2) To have confidence in the truth or value of something. As for Ambivilent's statement of needing to believe in something: You don't need to believe that something dropped from a height will fall once you have enough experience and come to see that every time something is dropped from a height, it falls. Then you know that whenever something is dropped from a height, it will fall (unless there is some other force preventing it from doing so) in which case you will make a new discovery. It doesn't take long to make sense out of your physical environment, with a little experience you begin to know how things interact. You know it because you've seen it, time and time again without fail. That's the way the earth works.

That all depends on the individual in question and if they value friendship or not. I think the reason many philosophers have said that friendship is a necessary is because a lot of people find that it is and they could not come across a counter-example, but they don't completely simplify it to the main point: It's necessary if you value it to the point where your life feels incomplete without it.

The problem with the Prisoner's Dilemma is that they are trying to make you practice rational concepts in an irrational world. That's always the way people attack rationality: by trying to disprove it with irrationality.

I agree. The truck driver had ambitions, he didn't want to be a truck driver forever but it was his start in moving towards those ambitions. Eddie could have gone to the Valley as well had he not chose to remain and serve the looters because he couldn't bear to start all over again.

The church doesn't always perform marriages, and they don't have to. It can always be done by a judge and I don't think that there is anything wrong with that. ... and I may be wrong but I don't know that homosexuals would want to be married in the church of a religion that condemns their way of life anyway. Marriage is not a religious establishment simply because a lot of people choose to be married in a church.

It was always my thought that the only person fit for that kind of job is the person who doesn't want it.