• • Individuality and God 
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Individualism  | The Calvinist/Randian sense of an individual so popular in this country is fundamentally mistaken. It fails to honor the unique value of actual individuals and substitutes an incoherent abstraction in their place, and abstraction in which, ironically, all individuals are the same in what makes them worthwhile.      View blog reactions

• • Pagan and American Individualism 
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Atheism  |Individualism  | Even in its secular guise, the traditional American model of an individual is deeply Protestant. From that perspective are individual atoms with firm boundaries and each having a unique relationship with God, a relationship for which we are ultimately entirely responsible. When this idea of an individual became secularized, it usually incorporated its Protestant Christian assumptions of atomistic separation from the world and from other people. From this perspective Ayn Rand is an atheistic version of extreme Protestantism. This similarity probably explains much of her popularity in this culture and is why so many who pretend to be Christians today talk like her. Despite all her talk about how different her philosophy was, it really fit pretty well with some important existing views. But I think this view of individuals is wrong both in terms of who we are and in its ethical implications.      View blog reactions

• • Encountering deities and spirits: First post 
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On balance, American society is an extreme expression of Western individualism. In what other country is such a disturbed view of human relations as expressed by Ayn Rand taken as an ideal by many adults? Remember Rand’s supporters in earlier comments on this blog who argued it was fine to despoil the Indians because they were not “using” their land in the way Randians found appropriate? (See my discussion with her devotees, starting with my 1:16 comment. ) They did so while praising voluntary cooperation among ‘rational’ people, without any awareness of the gaping and quite irrational hole in their reasoning.      View blog reactions

• The worst movies depicting witches and other pagans 
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I read LaVey's Satanic Bible as Ayn Rand plus magick.      View blog reactions

• • • Individuality, freedom, and superiority: Returning to Ayn Rand’s problems 
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Rand's model of the individual is lacking in depth because it does not address how each of us as individuals came to be who we are. She simply takes them for granted as elemental forces of nature. As the African proverb puts it: "I am because we are."      View blog reactions

• • • Ayn Rand, the philosophy of freedom, and a serial killer 
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Atheism  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |We The Living  |Egoism  | Rand's admiration for a sociopathic murderer is an eye-opener as to the moral sensibility that appeals to all too many 'conservative' and 'libertarian' Americans. She was one very disturbed and deeply wounded person, as her biographies show.      View blog reactions

• • John Mackey of Whole Foods, libertarian blindness, and new age spirituality 
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Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |We The Living  |Egoism  | There are no children in Rand's novels. All are adults, all are self-contained, who are as they are because of some inexplicable cause buried deeply in their very being. [....] By treating every adult as essentially impermeable forces of nature, and ignoring the existence of children, Rand and her followers cut themselves off from appreciating a large dimension of reality, for their environment obviously has an extraordinary impact on children. (I find it significant that Mackey himself is childless.) This ultra-individualism leads to his prescription for improving health in America: Eat better. It's your issue. Your responsibility. Because his sentiment is partly true its error of radical incompleteness is hard for those holding it to see.      View blog reactions