monart

Here's a cover from another Anthem printing:

Thank you. You've given me much to read and reflect on. (Anthem was my first, formative, Rand book, read in my late teens.)

Yours is another compassionate, inspiring heroic life.

What was the crucial idea that made you reject the (version of) Christianity you grew up with? How old were you then? How did you accidentally discover Objectivism? Was it initially mainly the art or the philosophy that attracted you? It appears that you were not, at least sense-of-life-wise, a Christian. Was God for you not Christian, but symbolic of some other supreme value? As for myself, my first encounter with "God" was after coming to Canada from China when a child (a decade before Objectivism) and, reading the word for the first time, I thought it was abbreviation for "Good", and it evoked feelings of reverence in me, even though I was not raised in a Christian or religious family.

Have you considered the possibility that the government is "allowing" it because the government (i.e., agencies, moral and immoral, of the government as exploited and manipulated by nefarious people) is complicit in the national security threat you're warning about? In my reading of 20th Century history, I've learned how governments, including in the US, have acted immorally and criminally with deception, death, and destruction on people domestic and abroad. When altruism and collectivism are invoked without opposition and refutation, individual and their rights can be discarded.

As a reminder of the importance of the Alexander Technique (AT), I quote from the original post: For Objectivists, as for all individuals, a full mind-body integration is essential to health and happiness, and the Alexander Technique, in consonance with Objectivism, will take one a long way towards that integration. What you need is just the allotment of time and the life-long commitment to improve oneself - to straighten up, to move steadfastly forward, to free your will to seek and love life, to stretch and reach out for new values, to embrace gracefully your purpose with balance, harmony, and unicity. Head up and forward! So, if you've given little or no consideration to AT before, now is the time to reconsider. Like learning Objectivism, it's never too late, whatever your age, seven or seventy-seven or older, whoever you are, whatever condition you're in, however resigned you are to your state -- you can choose to change, to do better., that's what you can do. See "What Can One Do?"

No, one cannot, but can one, over time, become the other? Many (most?) Objectivists were formerly Christians (and Jews). Are there any Christians who were formerly Objectivists? Not all Christians are the same, each varying in their rationality and in their potentiality for becoming Objectivists. The more deeply rooted their Christianity, the less their potential. Unlike the Rand-friendly "new Christian intellectuals" referenced in the originating post, most Christians who encounter Ayn Rand's work malign and reject her value. The popular speaker and author Jordan Peterson is an example of the latter. A Jungian psychologist and pragmatist Christian, Jordan Peterson, posing as an individualist, says he "acts as if God exists" and who writes in his book, 12 Rules for Life: “the inevitable suffering that life entails can rapidly make a mockery of the idea that happiness is the proper pursuit of the individual. . . . [Life] has more to do with develop­ing character in the face of suffering than with happiness.” He also has said in his YouTube videos that, “Happiness is for stupid people at amusement parks.” For Peterson, Jesus is the “transcendent” exemplar of morality, who should be emulated in a life of suffering and sacrifice. Consistent with all this is his asserting, in more YouTube videos, that he does not “regard Ayn Rand as a great mind…not sufficiently sophisticated”, although he “enjoyed” reading her “superficial” novel, Atlas Shrugged. His participation on a discussion panel with speakers from the Ayn Rand Institute made no difference in his continual dismissal of Ayn Rand and Objectivism. Contrast this with the aforementioned Rand-friendly Christians who aspire to become rational egoists in reverence to their "Galt-like" God. Are these egoistic Christians more or less dangerous than those like Peterson?

What specific help do you seek? A bodyguard? Money? More belief in and publicity for your plight? I sympathize with you in your condition and will help in ways that I can. I'm also mindful of, and defend myself where I can, against the dangers from communists, socialist, fascists, anarchists, welfare-statists, environmentalists, . . . from Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhist, Jews, even most atheists, . . . and from numerous other overt and covert enemies of Objectivism, who use the government or form secret organizations to further their agendas and stop those who oppose them. I'm on guard with you against them all. So, you may be outnumbered, but you're not alone.

Reverence comes from the love that one has for the highest values and ideals in one's life, a love that is earned by constant rational and productive action to create and defend those values. Reverence is an essential quality and reward of self-esteem. Ayn Rand has quoted Nietzsche's "a noble soul has reverence for itself", and identifies Self-Esteem as one of the three cardinal values of Objectivist ethics. Self-Esteem (or pride), for Christianity and other theistic/altruistic religions, is a cardinal sin, extolling an unreal or "suprareal" God to be the object of reverence (and obedience), drawing on people's need for reverence and romance, but, yes, misdirecting it away from the self. This God/Self dichotomy is the conflict that Rand-friendly Christians and theists try to resolve. Revert back to theism or reject it totally and redirect their reverence to their own selves.

Ayn Rand's noble romanticism, as she says in her Introduction to The Fountainhead, reclaims the emotions of reverence for the sacred back from traditional theistic religions' monopoly on them. Is this Objectivist romance for real ideals what attracts some Christians/theists to Ayn Rand's work, despite their Christianity/theism? Christianity's "transcendent reality" is God, and human earthly affairs are mundane. Galt's triumphs are "transcendent" in that they are heroic realizations of his highest ideals, the exalted becoming of his rational productive being. To be inspired by this noble, uplifting romance of Galt, is to "breathe in" and be energized by that "spirit".

The way I understand "self": Consciousness is consciousness of existence. Self-consciousness is consciousness of one's existence as a self that is conscious of existence. "Self" is an axiomatic concept, not as fundamental as "existence" and "consciousness", that integrates all the characteristics of a living, conscious entity. So the self, for humans, is at once a concept and a concrete being. The concrete self "conditions" the abstract self in that it's the concrete self that the abstract self refers to and is drawn from. Since human consciousness is the rational mind, the self is essentially the mind, but subsuming all the characteristics of the whole organismic mindful self.

That's the spirit! And the power to your victory. Fight them when you can. Shield yourself when you can't fight them. Ignore them when they matter little. Stay steadfast to the realization of your ideal man. Be happy.

Ayn Rand regarded religion as "primitive philosophy", as pre/non-rational explanations or responses to the types of metaphysical-moral questions you include as essential to religion. We know Objectivism's answers to those and other questions. Not until Ayn Rand and Objectivism, do Christians have a rational alternative to Christianity. Not for all Christians, but for those who are inspired by the triumph of John Galt but not by the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Since Christians are in the majority, many Objectivists come from Christian backgrounds, including those Christians, referenced in the initial post, who have yet to let go of their belief in a "transcendental" reality.

How would it be dangerous? Yes, it would be rough living, inconvenient and isolated, living a shrugging life, but would it be better than living under your present targeted persecution?

Without reifying the abstracted "self", and acknowledging the current unknowns about the evolutionary or neurological emergence of self-consciousness, one can observe extrospectively the emergence of the self in a child's growth from infancy to adolescence and beyond. And, one can also observe introspectively, the "emergence" or growth of one's own, continually maturing, increasingly distinctive self, as one engages productively with the world in a noble, purposeful way.

Yes, as Bishop Barron says in the video, God is summum bonum, the ultimate good, to be served by serving others. The Bishop also says God is love, and to love is, quoting Aquinas, "to will the good of the other". Christian love is altruistic, unselfish love, thus is self-sacrificial. The end of this "love" is as depicted in their images of Jesus suffering and death on the cross, even if they also celebrate the myth of Jesus' resurrection. What is the essential Christianity: the crucifixion or the resurrection, or both?

Rand's chapter, "Concepts of Consciousness", in her ITOE may help with reducing the perplexity. Is the "self" an abstraction from all that which characterizes a human person, including the mind, senses, feelings, choices, actions, the whole mind-body organism -- and not an actual separate existent? Or is the "self" a real emergent property in the growth of a person's consciousness? Or both and more? What is actually being sacrificed in Christian/theistic self-sacrifice?

Since you can't get police protection, have you tried going off-line, moving elsewhere, and trading by cash-and-barter?

Do you know who, specifically, they are? And, why they are they persecuting you, specifically? If you can't get police protection, can you "disappear" and assume a new identity? Do need financial help?

A comparison of Reality as "Existence Exists" and God as "Being qua Being" may help in understanding how some Christians (and theists in general) would become Objectivsts and how they could recover from their previous Christianity. I estimate that many if not most Objectivists are recovering Christians/theists. Tara Smith and Ben Bayer, of the Ayn Rand Institute, have stated that they, too, are/were recovering Catholics. (I, myself, haven't been a Christian or theist, but was born in a Daoist-Buddhist culture.) Another helpful examination is the esthetic comparison between John Galt and Jesus Christ. (I've read your excerpts of "Existence, We" and am curious but will have to wait until I have access to it. Thanks.)

This is more appropriate for another thread, but. . . In taking you seriously, I've been trying to learn from you, on-and-off forum, what specifically is the threat (existential or psychological) that is targeting you, and what, specifically, is the help you're seeking?

Some Christians, like those referenced in the originating post, try to interpret God in an Objecitivist way, using Ayn Rand's formulations, to make God an egoist and Christianity a life of "reason, rational self-interest, individualism, and individual rights". How well or not they can do this, are these "egoistic" Christians more or less of a threat to Objecivists than altruistic, faithful Christians?

As people like Jordan Peterson interprets it, when it suits their rationalization, "sacrifice" is giving up short-term pain for long-term gains, or giving up petty feelings for higher ones, and so on, but avoid acknowledging that "self-sacrifice" can only mean giving up one's life to serve the other (God, Society, Nation, Environment, etc.)

It's not "entirely immoral", if loving yourself is in order to better love God and serve others.

I see how you regard "self" as that which thinks (and that which chooses). Do you include any aspect of the body as part of the self? Or is the self strictly a consciousness? Is there "consciousness as such", apart from the objects of its consciousness?