• • • Tea Party brings Ayn Rand back 
Noah Kristula-Green, FrumForum Atheism  Ayn Rand Center  Ayn Rand Institute  Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  Essay Contests  Yaron Brook  At least one part of the American economy has enjoyed a boom since the financial crisis: the estate of Ayn Rand and sales of her dystopic door stopper novel, Atlas Shrugged. Until recently interest in Rand represented a small subculture in conservative intellectual life—small, perhaps, because as long as Rand lived, she belligerently chase away anyone who disagreed, even slightly, with her “philosophy” of Objectivism. Rand denounced libertarians as “a monstrous, disgusting bunch of people” and conservatives as “futile, impotent and, culturally, dead.” In return, critics found Rand’s declaration that “The only philosophical debt I can acknowledge is to Aristotle,” laughable. The revelations of Rand’s destructive affair with Nathanial Branden undercut Rand’s writings on “rationally” practicing sex and love. Her acolytes were called “crazy” on the rare occasions they interacted with the outside world. But since the financial crisis, all has changed. The Ayn Rand Institute, which owns the Rand copyrights, claims that sales of Atlas Shrugged tripled between 2009 and 2008.     Share on Facebook

• • Against the grain: Greek Orthodox priest finds God in adventures 
Tonyaa Weathersbee, Times-Union (Jacksonville, FL) Atheism  The Fountainhead  After reading Ayn Rand’s book “The Fountainhead,” [Martin Ritsi] declared himself an atheist. “I believed that religion was being used to control you, and if you use your mind, you’d understand that religion is about controlling your mind,” Ritsi said. “As a young man searching for truth, I bought into that.” However, Ritsi said, he began to change once he entered college. He decided that, to be respectful to his mind, he had to allow for the possibility of God’s existence.     Share on Facebook

• • • We The Living 
John Gray, New Statesman Atheism  Ayn Rand Institute  Atlas Shrugged  We The Living  Capitalism  Personal life  Inaccurate  Book review.Rand's religion - a brand of evangelical atheism so extreme that Richard Dawkins's version sounds almost reasonable - required that everyone think alike and live in the same way.     Share on Facebook

• • • Atlas Shrugged poor doctrine to follow 
James A. Genisio, The Northwestern (Oshkosh, WI) Atheism  Atlas Shrugged  Egoism  I have called ‘Atlas Shrugged’ atheistic, materialistic and selfishness. Perhaps a better criticism of ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is that it treats people as economic units instead of spiritual beings. ‘Atlas Shrugged’ considers John Galt a great man. ‘Atlas Shrugged’ would not think much of St. Francis of Assisi, Mother Theresa or Dorothy Day.     Share on Facebook

• • • A symposium starring Aristotle and Ayn Rand 
Ellis Washington, WorldNetDaily Atheism  Atlas Shrugged  The Virtue of Selfishness  Capitalism  Egoism  Personal life  Aristotle: As a conservative I accept the world as it is and distrust the politics of abstract reason, unlike the sophists, humanists and liberals whose empiricism views reason separate from experience. Despite her exceeding love of my ideas, I answer “yes” to the question – Is Ayn Rand’s radical atheism a terminal defect of Objectivism philosophy? Conservatism and capitalism aside, the major tenet of Objectivism philosophy effectively is the worship of selfishness and narcissism, which is antithetical to real conservatism and capitalism, which are rooted in the Republic, the free market, morality, assiduousness, veritas, virtue and God.     Share on Facebook

• • • In over his head 
Daily News-Record (Harrisonburg, VA) Atheism  Ayn Rand was a militant atheist crackpot and sexual libertine who thought, among other things, that cigarette smoking symbolized man’s mastery of fire at his fingertips. Her acolytes were intellectual slaves. She banished anyone who disagreed with her to the outer darkness of the real world, where the utopian schemes of bumptious ideologues do not and cannot work. Rand’s Objectivism, which reduces all human relationships to monetary transactions, is the flip side of communism. Objectivists worship the individual; communists worship the state. Both hate God. Birchers are not Randians.     Share on Facebook

• • Book review: ‘William F. Buckley Jr.: The Maker of a Movement’ 
Jamie Weinstein, Daily Caller Atheism  While Buckley sought to bring the different elements of conservatism under one roof, he had little tolerance for the “kooks” in the movement. And so Buckley took it upon himself to purge those who embarrassed the cause. As Edwards notes, the first person excised from the movement was Ayn Rand. Besides her dogmatic tone, Buckley disdained her hatred of God, “her desiccated philosophy’s conclusive incompatibility with the conservative’s emphasis on the transcendence, intellectual and moral.” This is not to say that Buckley thought that atheists could not be good conservatives. “Can you be a conservative and not believe in God?,” Buckley asked in an essay. His answer was yes. But he went on to ask, “Can you be a conservative and despise God and feel contempt for those who believe in God?” On that question, he answered a decisive no.     Share on Facebook

• • • The good-bad books of summer 
Margaret Wente, Globe and Mail (Toronto) Atheism  Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  Egoism  Exodus wouldn’t make anyone’s list of literary masterpieces. But it surely ranks among the most influential American novels of the 20th century – not with other writers, but with the public. The same is true of Atlas Shrugged, which, I am embarrassed to say, also made a profound impression on my young and malleable mind.[....] [Ayn Rand’s] book embodied just the kind of rigid, judgmental absolutism that’s irresistible to self-absorbed adolescents who believe society is fundamentally screwed up and their parents are hopeless losers. No doubt, it helped make me more than usually insufferable. Eventually, I forgave my parents. I came to realize that laissez-faire capitalism was not, in fact, the answer to everything, nor were all religious people dupes and fools. Ayn Rand now seems a faintly ridiculous figure.     Share on Facebook

• Quote of the day — July 7, 2010 
Family Security Matters Atheism  Personal life  Isabel Paterson was a Canadian-born journalist and political philosopher, and a staunch defender of capitalism. She was a close associate of Ayn Rand, though they differed on issues of religion (Ayn Rand was an atheist).     Share on Facebook

• • Lee, Rand and LDS 
Mike Hansen, Salt Lake Tribune Atheism  Atlas Shrugged  Paul Rolly’s “Mike Lee and the big tent theory” (Tribune, July 5) reports that Republican Senate candidate Mike Lee, a Mormon, follows “the personal-responsibility philosophy of author Ayn Rand” and is a fan of her novel Atlas Shrugged. Therein lies a contradiction. Mike Lee either understands Rand’s incredibly anti-Christian message in Atlas Shrugged, or he does not. If he likes the book’s message, then he’s not a real Mormon. He’s either a Mormon or a fan of Rand — either way, he’s not telling the truth about what he believes.     Share on Facebook

• • • Mr. Beck, meet Mr. Chambers 
Alan Snyder, Big Government Atheism  Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  My third quibble [with Glenn Beck] has been his reliance on proponents of Ayn Rand’s philosophy as a basis for championing the free market and capitalism. It’s that third quibble that leads me to write today. I missed his program from June 15th, but on his site I saw that he quoted Whittaker Chambers as one of the media elite who mocked Rand. [....] Rand was an atheist who hated Christianity because it told its adherents to think of others before oneself. Chambers, upon reading her book, saw this philosophy quite clearly and distanced himself from it. He said—and I believe he is correct on this—that materialism, whether from the Right or the Left, leads to dictatorship of some kind. He sensed in Rand’s [Atlas Shrugged] a tone of “I’m right, and no disagreement is allowed.” That’s why he made his most controversial statement at the end of the review, one that angered Randians considerably.     Share on Facebook

• • Mike Lee and the big tent theory 
Paul Rolly, Salt Lake Tribune Atheism  Atlas Shrugged  When Curtis Mortensen, of Kaysville, tried to contact [Senate candidate Mike] Lee to get a better idea of how he plans to represent Utah in the Senate, he had a good discussion with a campaign staffer who said Lee followed the personal-responsibility philosophy of author Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged, a legend among conservative, small-government advocates, whose followers also include former Fed chief Alan Greenspan. Lee’s campaign manager, McKay Christensen, has listed Rand’s books as among his favorites. [....] Rand was an outspoken atheist.     Share on Facebook

• • • Not going well for conservative Christians 
Eric Poole, Ellwood City Ledger (PA) Atheism  Anthem  Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  Egoism  Thanks to participants in the Tea Party movement, Rand’s philosophy, and that’s using a term loosely, of anti-government, pro-business beliefs have been rehabilitated. Among her admirers is Kentucky Republican U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul, who, contrary to Internet rumor, was not named in Ayn Rand’s honor. The central theme of Rand’s worldview is [....] that selfishness is one of the highest human impulses and that society benefits most when everyone is looking out for himself. In short, the word “team” does have an “I” the way Rand spelled it. If you’re searching for a Christian-friendly agenda now, you’re probably looking at the Democratic side of the aisle.     Share on Facebook

• • • Beck should abandon Ayn Rand’s philosophies 
Don Glover, Monroe News Star Atheism  Atlas Shrugged  In the last few months I have detected, as a conservative myself, a small yet traceable seed develop in the presentations of Glenn Beck. They provoked the skeptic in me. In him I saw a move from authentic conservatism toward Ayn Rand and her notorious brand of it. That suspicion has materialized. In his June 15 afternoon TV program, the seed Beck had planted became a full-grown, wild tree. He endorsed, apparently without qualification, the philosophy and writings of Rand, who is further to the right than Attilla the Hun.     Share on Facebook

• Libertarians in a state-run world 
Murray N. Rothbard, LewRockwell.com Atheism  “First published in Liberty Magazine, Dec. 1987/Vol 1.3, pp. 23–25.”We libertarians will never win the hearts and minds of Americans or of the rest of the world if we persist in wrongly identifying libertarianism with atheism. If even Stalin couldn’t stamp out religion, libertarians are not going to succeed with a few Randian syllogisms.     Share on Facebook

• • • Atlas Shrugged filming begins: Will it be worse than book? 
Barrett Brown, Huffington Post Atheism  Atlas Shrugged movie  Atlas Shrugged  After a half-century of false starts, filming has finally begun on a film version of Ayn Rand’s final and most explanatory novel, Atlas Shrugged. The timing of this independent production (prompted though it was merely by a filmmaker’s potential loss of rights were filming not to have begun by last weekend) is rather splendid, as the election of Barack Obama and the consequent and confused perception that a free republic has now crossed some sort of line into statist tyranny has sparked a new round of interest in the novel on the part of conservatives-- many are in for some nasty surprises to the extent that they actually read and understand the book or make any further study of Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism.     Share on Facebook

• • Free markets need a spiritual dimension 
Anthony Wile, Right Side News Atheism  Capitalism  In a recent editorial at the Daily Bell, Dr. Nathaniel Brandon, perhaps Ayn Rand’s most famous disciple, wrote a wonderful article entitled “The Foundations of a Free Society.” In the article, he pointed out that a free-market approach, while admirable, lacks a certain spiritual element. This is an enormously important point and one to which the free-market movement likely pays too little attention.     Share on Facebook

• • A witness for America 
Cindy Simpson, American Thinker Atheism  Atlas Shrugged  In 1957, Chambers penned a scathing review of Rand’s godless philosophy of Atlas Shrugged: “Nor has the author, apparently, brooded on the degree to which, in a wicked world, a materialism of the Right and a materialism of the Left first surprisingly resemble, then, in action, tend to blend each with each, because, while differing at the top in avowed purpose, and possibly in conflict there, at bottom they are much the same thing. ... The question becomes chiefly: who is to run that world in whose interests, or perhaps, at best, who can run it more efficiently?” Chambers, then, not only found similarities between liberalism and communism, but also between objectivism and the secular materialism that sometimes manifests itself in solutions of the right. All propose answers to the world’s problems that elevate Mind over Soul, prioritize the common good over individual responsibility and Freedom, and ultimately place Man over God.     Share on Facebook

• • What would Buckley do? 
Malcolm Kline, Canada Free Press Atheism  Personal life  [In his book, William F. Buckley, Jr.: The Maker Of A Movement, Lee] Edwards brings to life the conflict between the committed Catholic Buckley and the adamantly atheist Ayn Rand. “When Buckley first met Rand, her first words to him, heavily accented by her native Russian tongue, were, ‘You ahrr too intelligent to believe in Gott,’” Edwards writes. “For the next two to three years, Buckley sent the Russian-born writer postcards in liturgical Latin.” “But levity with Miss Rand was not an effective weapon,” Buckley later wrote.     Share on Facebook

• • At the 2010 Scripps National Spelling Bee 
Jordan Carr, The Awl Atheism  We The Living  The best religious irony of the contest was when a girl who listed Ayn Rand’s We the Living as a book she likes received the word “fleuron” and got a sentence involving bishops and prayer.     Share on Facebook