KevinD

Have you ever even met this girl?? Methinks you're being played — BIG time!

He'll probably say that he doesn't know there is no God; it's an "intuition" to him — i.e., he feels it. As the brilliant Ellsworth Toohey once said: Don't bother to examine a folly, ask yourself only what it accomplishes.

So Oliver, what's new and exciting in your life?

Can you conclude that fact absolutely?

And Weezie was your first lady?

Because "nothing" does not exist. That's how come we don't have any of it.

If "God" did not create existence, then what precisely is His claim to fame? God isn't GOD if He's just one more fact, force or phenomenon within the universe.

What if you chose not to "believe" in anything for which you saw no evidence or rational proof? What if you adopted an absolutely naturalistic viewpoint — that is, you saw the universe is a lawful, intelligible realm of cause and effect, one in which contradictions and miracles are not possible? Forget the Creator for the moment: What is your motive behind your beliefs?

What sort of contradiction do you imagine exists between these two? That's a pretty fantastic kind of idea. You're talking about placing your faith in the existence of an omnipotent, etherial being, one who created all things (including you), and who presumably has some sort of hand in every event which takes place in the universe. Yet this belief is to have nothing to do with how you live your life?

The same applies to romantic love, and to sex — and even there it's a very broad abstraction, requiring much insight and a certain level of sophistication to understand, and to apply properly.

There's a great deal of metaphorical (or semi-metaphorical) speech used to describe certain emotional aspects of sex and love. Think "winning her over," only stronger. Much stronger.

Frank Zappa can be amusing and funny, and occasionally he has some good things to say. Musically and philosophically, he's basicially an anarchist: he's against all sorts of things, but it's hard to tell what exactly he's for. As a friend of mine once said about Zappa: "I enjoy listening to his albums — once."

Because it's TRUE!

A criminal might feel like a million dollars after stealing as much, but how does he feel about himself long-range? What got him into crime in the first place? What makes him believe that his attempt to live by force is any kind of appropriate course for a human being? What type of void must exist between his ears for him to associate his blatant parasitism with masculinity, superior virtue, or — egads — independence? Don't confuse an outwardly belligerent or hostile attitude with a genuine sense of efficacy and worth; don't imagine that every person on the face of the planet is sincerely concerned to live a moral life. Few criminals are victims of honest errors of reasoning: most are appallingly non-thinking entities, motivated not so much by faulty moral codes as they are by the desperate desire to prove that issues of right and wrong have nothing to do with them.

One needn't be too learned in Christianity to see that Jesus — assuming he was at all as the Gospels have portrayed him — was anything but a shining exponent of self-esteem. People who enjoy and appreciate themselves do not demand obedience from others: they don't seek acolytes; they don't set themselves up as all-encompassing authority figures to be followed blindly in the manner that Jesus appears to have done. To put it another way: If I am at peace with myself — that is, if I enjoy a comfortable relationship with my own person and the world around me — I am unlikely to begin my essential philosophical message with the threat that anyone who disagrees with me will be sentenced to eternal punishment in Hell. The very essence of Christianity is suffering, self-sacrifice, and the total abnegation of man's life and well-being on earth. This is not a matter of interpretation, but of explicit and repeated statement throughout all of the relevant literature. If Jesus meant anything that he taught, he could only have been a profoundly unhappy person indeed.

I think you're dealing with the real "activist" mentality here — the kind that just doesn't care much for ideas. Did you read the response that was posted to your well-written and highly principled comments? "Welcome to the forum; I don't agree with everything you said." The end, next topic please. That really says it all. This case is a good illustration of the principle that not everyone who (ostensibly) wants the same things you want is necessarily on your side.

I just found this notice, inciting people to protest the event: http://www.alipac.us/modules.php?name=Foru...pic&t=53426 Note that it says nothing about the program being a *debate*. They make it sound as if ARI was "hosting" a solo lecture by this crackbrain! I was very sorry to learn that the event had been cancelled. I was so looking forward to seeing Dr. Brook trouce the poor bastard utterly, whomever the hell he is.

Here we go again. . . . If your relationship is otherwise good, why are you even discussing these irrelevant, hot-button topics with her? Can't you both agree to disagree, and leave it at that?

It's interesting that someone mentioned Tuck Everlasting. (Although I can't figure out what that person is trying to say otherwise.) In the movie, William Hurt's character, commenting on his family's magical inability to die, laments to Winnie, the girl who has discovered them and has learned their incredible secret: "We're like rocks. We just exist." The film is impressive for how much it gets right. One particularly memorable line, spoken by Hurt, itself ought to be immortalized: "Don't fear death," he urges Winnie: "Fear the unlived life." Tuck and family ought to know. Man is nothing if not a being in constant process.

I think it's a marvelous thing. It certainly keeps me on my toes — all of the time! What are your thoughts on the concept?

Certainly Rand did not dismiss women as being unable to attain firsthand rationality. Rand herself, after all, was a woman. Have you read her "About a Woman President" essay? Feminist "interpretations" of Miss Rand's writing and thought cannot be relied on here.

The entire second and third paragraphs.

Surely there are many important differences between men and women which do not directly pertain to sex. However, strictly speaking and by definition these cannot be issues of masculinity or femininity, for exactly the reasons described in my message above.

I find it very sad that anyone — particularly a man — could ever believe that masculinity and femininity are "meaningless concepts." Simply speaking, masculinity is the psychological state of a man who has attained a very high level of comfort with the fact of his maleness; with his male sexuality and with everything it implies — i.e., with his sexual role relative to woman. Likewise, a woman can be said to be appropriately feminine to the extent that she enjoys an easygoing, accepting relationship with herself in this same regard; to the degree that she embraces, rather than fights, her sexuality and her sexual role relative to man. Now, we could argue all day and night what exactly is a man's sexual role relative to woman, and what exactly is a woman's sexual role relative to a man. But there are certain basic and noncontroversial facts about sex which only a very naive, evasive, or excessively abstract kind of person could possibly not be aware of. (Facts such as: Man is the one who enters, and woman is the one who is entered; man is essentially active, while woman is relatively passive and receptive; that literally nothing can happen in sex without the man's interest and intense desire; that a woman could be taken without her consent — which is, of course, a terrible crime — but a man never could be; that man is the essential initiator and prime mover in sex, the one most crucially responsible for setting the direction and overall tone of a sexual partnership.) Masculinity and femininity most definitely are relational concepts; they pertain exclusively to the sexual interaction of man and woman. If an issue or topic does not fairly directly involve sex or sexuality, it cannot in any meaningful sense be said to be an issue of masculinity or femininity.

There will be a screening of the Academy Award-nominated documentary Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life this Saturday, January 13, 2007 at 7:30 pm at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Bing Theater. Director Michael Paxton will be in attendance for a Q&A following the screening. Regular Admission is $9; LACMA members, seniors and students are $6. This is the first in a series of AR-related films which will be screened at LACMA. For more info, click here.