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In 1775 Alexander Hamilton wrote: "The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records. They are written, as with a sun beam in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power." And the Declaration of Independence says: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights..." Both quotes from our Founding Fathers represent their firm belief in god-endowed rights. This dogmatic view is erroneous. It led to massive mistakes in the Constitution, and grave violations of individual rights throughout our existence as a nation. Millions of citizens now don't believe in god-given rights. They have realized that if god is a myth, then so are the rights he mythically installed in humans. This fantastic foundation for our nation has therefore cracked wide open, and it's crumbling before our eyes. Ayn Rand tried to fix the flaw. She looked away from god and toward individual human lives. She pointed toward an objective basis for man's rights, and thus for our nation. But most intellectuals have not followed in her footsteps. They have returned to more primitive foundations for nationhood, namely religion and race. If someone believes that rights come from a particular god, then logically their nation should be based on the religion of that particular god. And so we see Jews, Christians and Muslims at each other's throats, because each group is fundamentally, spiritually dissimilar, and therefore entirely incompatible with the other in terms of building or sustaining a nation of religionists who believe rights come from their particular god and faith. What if someone does not believe in a rights-endowing creator? What then should be the thing that unites a nation of people? If not a spiritual characteristic, like religious faith, then what about a physical characteristic, like race? Race, however, is a crude trait upon which to form a nation of intelligent people. So it must be conflated with some sort of culture. Logically that will end up being the culture most closely associated with the preferred race. And here we arrive at the notion of a nation founded on "ethnicity": the ethno-state. Here, rights do not originate from one's god, but from one's "ethnic" identity. The ethno-nationalist, like the religionist, represents a political misintegration of the physical and the spiritual. He seeks an integrated whole, but cannot objectively grasp the concept of individual rights by inducing it from the lives of individual men. Ethno-nationalists are biased toward the physical aspects of human life, whereas religionists are biased toward the spiritual. Finally there is the political globalist, who might see the problems with "ethnic" and religion-based nationalism, but who has no fix for the concept of individual rights. Ultimately he rejects individualism as fatally flawed, adopts a collectivist position regarding rights, and advocates something like worldwide communism. In my view, this must be worse than any nationalism, because it sacrifices the individual to all of humanity, whereas nationalism sacrifices the individual to a portion of humanity. Less total sacrificing will be required under nationalism, because there are less people in the group for whom one must sacrifice. Of course it makes little difference to the individual person whether he's sacrificed for globalism or nationalism, unless he supports one of those causes. While I think globalism is generally a bigger threat to civilization, this does not mean I support a religious or "ethnic" nationalism. Rather, a nation should be founded on the shared recognition of objectively identified rights in relation to the individual's natural life.
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Really the full title of this message should be "If God Doesn't Exist, Then "Objective Reality" Is Really Nothing More Than a Cosmic Fart, So Why Do Objectivists Have Such Deep Reverence for It?" But that would be too long for the forum system. Getting down to brass tacks though, at the end of Atlas Shrugged, after the blowout of Project F, James Taggart, one of the villains, his brain just basically "snaps" and he sits down on the floor of the Project F room and he becomes basically this empty blubbering shell of a man, he reaches this dejected low point that is as abjectly low as a man can go. And this isn't because of sorrow at moral evil (moral evil according to the conventional non-objectivist definition that most people go by), it's because of his supposed inability to accept objective reality, his supposed incompatability with objective reality. Objectivism's atheism seems incompatable with Objectivism's deep reverence for "objective reality". Jim Taggart's downfall, in which he becomes this blubbering empty shell of a man, would be understandable if he were a character in a theist novel who discovered that he had been dissing God this whole time by dissing God's Creation, God's Reality. If he became this blubbering "repentant sinner" down on the floor at that point, in a theist novel, that would be understandable. But in an atheist framework, I just don't see it. At best, Objectivists are telling people to "love the one they're stuck with" even though it's admittedly no more than a cosmic fart that is no more deserving of any reverence than a fantasy world that somebody has built inside their head. Thoughts?
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OUR TWO WORLDS, SPIRITUAL AND MATERIAL Sections 2 and 3 have been added to "Futile Confrontations by Ludwik Kowalski" at: ******* THE LINK IS NOT ALLOWED. USE GOOGLE Comments will be appreciated, Thank you in advance, Ludwik .
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According to Heinrich Harrer, friend of the 13th Dalai Lama, and author of Seven Years in Tibet [1953]: "Whether it is Lhasa or Rome -- all are united by one wish: to find God and to serve Him." This is true. But ultimately no person, institution or concept is noble or great enough. Only the Holy Individual is worth finding and serving in all His potential nobility and greatness.
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The following advice is from a prayer book: "Pray as if everything depended upon God, act as if everything depended on you." I think that this is consistent with the idea of NOMA, formulated by the biologist Stephen Gould. We exist in the material world; God exists in the spiritual world. The context in which the idea of NOMA was formulated is summarized in my article about futile conflicts between theists and atheists: http://pages.csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/theo/atheist.html
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My article about futile confrontations between theists and atheists appeared in the April 2012 Issue of American Atheist Magazine. The link is: http://csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/theo/atheist.html Please share this link with other potential readers. Thank you in advance, Ludwik Kowalski (see Wikipedia)