There is nothing to look up. His posts are notorious for pretentious nonsense like this one, which is why you didn't follow it. They have nothing to do with Ayn Rand, which he knows little about.

There isn't any "Rand personality cult" and no one has ever said that Ayn Rand is "infallible - as if she were the Pope". That is a dishonest strawman invoked by Ashinoff trying to make himself look reasonable, which is itself the most arrogant of all in his anti-Ayn Rand attacks. You were right the first time.

No one has said "one solution" "completely addressess all things". One solution to what problem? Ayn Rand was a novelist and philosopher. She did not attempt to address, let alone answer "everything".

The "individual right to determine one's own beliefs" does not mean that there are no principles of logic and anything can subjectively be believed to make it true or even meaningful. Rejecting "If it's not consistent a-z it simply can't be or isn't right" as "bullshit" is Ashinoff's distortion of the fact that contradictions do not exist, which has been recognized since Aristotle. "Life" does not "dictate" the opposite.

His vacuous smears against other forum members as "the sharpest minister quoting scripture" are a dishonest strawman, not a response to the numerous explanations that have been given here.

This is predicated on what assumptions are accepted for God and religion.

What post where? Can you provide the link or just answer directly?

Read the Post above by Lucky and you will find, I hope, that my comment was Germaine to the question.

I think you just covered 'Do Unto Others....._

While I respect what you said I cannot agree. What you present is akin to a Doctor pointing out symptoms as the totality of a malady while refusing to identity that there is a sourse. My view.
The trappings of religion are problematic, which is why I have faith, not religion.
'can't support' is a poor choice of words as I am and have always been a Constitutional Conservative. You act as if a person can only choose one complete ideological vein to follow. Hogwash. I, and you, construct and define our personal beliefs and no one has the right to blueprint our beliefs for us. Ask it should be we are the sovereign authors of our own philosophy and it need not be 100% consistent to anyone but you.

Go re-read that portion of the book. You'll find that Galt's plane turned up a valley and Dagny lost sight of it. When she made the same turn, Galt's plane was nowhere to be seen. She didn't watch it pass through the barrier. She plowed forward into a perceived mountain not because she had watched Galt's plane do the same, but out of sheer faith.

If the only way you can try to define something is using an anti-definition, I'd suggest you re-think your approach. It takes zero thought and/or effort to say "that's not what I believe" and it provides zero useful information.

No, you just didn't say anything. Like Dagny wasn't using faith, she could visible see the plane...

Atheism is no more a religion than off is a TV channel,
than being bald is a hairstyle,
not-collecting-stamps is a hobby,
and people who do not play sports are a type of athlete.

(From: theatheistconservative.com/)

What women (and men) want-
when you want something you cannot have, that is religion.

If you pose a question but only accept answers you want to hear, you are blinded by your own bias and are the very zealot you accuse of others. If you want to disagree, do so cogently with counter-examples. If all you have to respond with is "I don't like your answer", you won't like this forum. We make people think and think hard. This is not an echo chamber.

That's a lot of bs, thanks for you input

The first thing you have to understand is that faith is what prompts one to confirm a hypothesis. Scientists pursue truth first by postulating and then acting to prove one's hypothesis even though they don't know what the actual outcome will be. They hope for a specific outcome, but until they receive confirmation, they act on faith.

Just got done watching a well-done piece on black holes on Nova (PBS). The initial speculation about Black Holes actually came from a German who calculated artillery trajectories. He sent his theory to Albert Einstein who received the computations with extreme skepticism. Despite his development of Relativity and the Photoelectric effect, Einstein could never bring himself to believe Black Holes existed. In fact, the scientific community was bitterly divided until proof (via indirect observation) was discovered in the late 1990's. Now we find that there are confirmed Black Holes (again through indirect observation) at the center of every galaxy so far examined.

It is the same with an entrepreneur. There is little or no guarantee that any given entrepreneur will succeed in business. The facts actually discourage entrepreneurship in that 2 out of three entrepreneurs fail within three years. Yet a capitalistic society depends on the small-business entrepreneur and their willingness to fail.

There's one example of faith from Atlas Shrugged which illustrates the point perfectly. When Dagny pursues Galt's plane and ends up crashing through the barrier/illusion into the Gulch, what principle other than faith is she operating on?

Once you understand that faith is a motivation to act, you see that actually faith is intertwined in nearly every action one takes. Can one prove that a "god" exists? Well, to do so, you would have to follow the proper steps. First you would have to define just exactly what that "god" would be. You have to assume existence and define what that existence would look like before you can ever attempt to construct a method of confirming your hypothesis. If you assume non-existence, then you poison the hypothesis right out of the door and all you succeed in doing is confirming your own bias - not discovering truth. The other problem comes in defining the attributes of "god" so as to go about attempting to devise a test for that god's existence and all too frequently the definition given is inherently contradictory and again serves only to confirm an atheist's bias.

Are there fundamentally-flawed definitions of "gods" today which are still nonetheless treated as valid? Assuredly. The Greek Pantheon was debunked by none other than Socrates and his student Plato. One has only to read The Republic to see a thoughtful examination of the fundamental problem between holding nearly limitless power and being capricious. I do not assert that all religions are equally valid because no two definitions for their respective "gods" are equivalent. Does that mean, however, that just because there are 99 demonstrably false definitions of "god" that there may not be one correct one? Thomas Edison tried nearly 2000 variants of the light bulb before he arrived at one which worked consistently. His example was one not only of faith, but in absolute pursuit of truth.

So you believe god can be scientifically proven? What's the point in faith if you can prove it exists?

This is a song written by a father whose young son died from SIDS. He is hoping to see his son again even if as a ghost.

We saw a ghost inside our house
Or was it wishful thinkin'?
Oh god, don't leave us by ourselves
Or we're bound to take up drinkin'

Please send us a miracle
So I know that there is meaning
I said, "I think that it's a miracle
Just to be breathin'"

So live on
Baby live on
Live on
Baby live on

Packed up my clothes in a grocery bag
I'm going to find the creator
An old man in the clouds or a happy little alien
Whoever it is I need to thank her

And even though I don't know God
I'm happy with the mystery
And I'm certain that I feel it
Every time that you sing to me

Songs, you say
Life is like a song
It's a song
A hum-able song

I watched you sleep until 5 am
Cause I want to be part of your dreaming
Oh love, don't leave me by myself
Or I'm bound to lose my meaning

We'll start a little family
And call it our religion
Hunt for ghosts inside our house
'Cause we'll never give up wishing

That we live on
May we live on
In our song
Our hum-able song

Only if you define religion as such. I define religion as any set of ideals which drives your life. Atheism is as much a religion as any theistic creed, as it drives one's values and choices. (PS - that's the same thing the Supreme Court held when it granted atheists protection under the First Amendment.)

I think one of the things that tends to give many religions and philosophies perceived flaws is that they confuse the principles with the inconsistent behaviors of their respective subscribers with respect to their professed tenets. Human beings are notoriously flawed: fickle and emotion-driven. Thus any religion or creed which demands perfection such as the Judeo-Christian tradition is going to appear to be flawed because it contradicts with basic human frailty. The question is how the religion attempts to resolve this seeming contradiction.

To me, however, there is one question which the common philosophy tends to ignore and only the theistic "religion" approaches: that of the end state of the soul. People want to know what the end-game is to existence. The major flaw I see in atheism is that it provides no such postulation aside from nihilism. People want more than this. They want to matter. And I think this core rationale is key: it is fundamentally unreasonable to accept as a precept of existence one's eventual non-existence.

Your first clause is both foundational and fundamentally flawed. Why? Because in order to definitively ascertain that "God can not be observed" one would have to have all knowledge of where and how to conduct said observation, have the power to conduct said observation, AND be so thorough as to leave no doubt. The only way that would be possible is if one had the same powers and intelligence as the very God being postulated and then denied. You create for yourself an argument whose very assertion is self-contradictory in its exploration.

AJAshinoff has a much more solid stance: to simply say I have not observed but that does not preclude observation which may be.

I agree with you. Religious people hold "God" as a standard of value. I believe those who favor science will hold "society" instead as their standard of value- not themselves. They'll take whatever ideology that's in front of them. I've only read "The Objectivist Ethics" so I have a lot to learn, but I do want to read a bit of everything before I truly dive into Rand. Specifically Kant for fun haha...

I do agree that an individual's "choice" matters (and that one choice is better than the other). However, there's nothing that could change a true religious person's mind unless they do the research themselves. So... to each their own.

Glad you support my Bible-reading!

It's a bit off topic, but you can absolutely determine there is no god, because there is nothing that can violate the basic laws of reality, which is what's required for godhood.
Although, more fundamentally, as someone pointed out to me recently, you don't need to disprove god, because it's just a random assertion, and random assertions shouldn't be asserted in the first place. Much less need any refuting.

This is the biggest flaw in conservatism, not Rand's philosophy. You can't support the constitution, not consistently, but still believe in religion and all the collectivist, authoritarian, mystical and all round unconstitutional baggage that comes with it.
Religion has destroyed conservatism.

Sadly true.

This Gulch probably believes it, but religion and Objectivism are not compatible.
Objectivism is the philosophy for life on earth, by using your mind and living in accordance with the facts of reality.
Religion is about life after death (death cultism) and rejects life on this earth, using your mind and living in accordance with the facts of reality.

So you see, they are opposing ideologies.

No. Mindlessly obeying commands from on high is not a good way to live.
A good way to live is to think for yourself, which requires rejection of commandments.

If taken as duties, then by the nature of duty ethics they are as bad the Big Ten without the religion. Beyond that they are an eclectic hodgepodge with no fundamental hierarchy or justification given.

Some are common sense but some specific rules are destructive, starting with the first in which he says he is certain of nothing, requiring a "feeling" for pervasive skepticism. (Where does that leave the whole list?)

The fifth on authority is ambiguous. What kind of authority? Don't respect the law? Don't respect someone with specialized knowledge as contextually authoritative? Don't respect dictators only because there are other dictators rather than out of individualism?