George Will On Religion and Founding Needs Ayn Rand's Theory of Rights
"He even says explicitly that neither successful self-government nor “a government with clear limits defined by the natural rights of the governed” requires religion. For these, writes Will, “religion is helpful and important but not quite essential.”"
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I tire of your rantings and ramblings. You make claims without any basis, you utterly refuse to look at facts I've presented, and you refuse to acknowledge that, possibly, someone other than yourself MAY have something valid to say. You rant about what this board is supposedly for, I explain something and you say "that doesn't matter", etc, etc, etc. You are blinded by your hatred, and not a single word I can ever say in and of itself will ever change that fact. I'm not mad at you, becuase if it weren't for the grace of God, I'd be doing the same thing you are, and probably would be even more vitriolic than you are. Have a good life, I pray some day God will have mercy on you and show you the Truth. And I'm sure you're seething right now about me even saying what I've said here, whether you admit it or not. Good day.
Ayn Rand makes claims. We make claims. You make claims. The Chinese make claims. Plato made claims. The Nazis made claims. The Communists made claims.
Every single person thinks they know what's best for themselves and often for other people. The only one who can trump our knowledge of what's best for ourselves is one who is omniscient. And rarely can we make determinations about what is best for someone ELSE better than they can do for themselves. But it does happen in certain circumstances.
C'mon Robbie. You can do better than personal attacks.
From Monticello's website (but hey, what would they know about TJ):
With the help of Richard Price, a Unitarian minister in London, and Joseph Priestly, an English scientist-clergyman who emigrated to America in 1794, Jefferson eventually arrived at some positive assertions of his private religion. His ideas are nowhere better expressed than in his compilations of extracts from the New Testament "The Philosophy of Jesus" (1804) and "The Life and Morals of Jesus" (1819-20?). The former stems from his concern with the problem of maintaining social harmony in a republican nation. The latter is a multilingual collection of verses that was a product of his private search for religious truth. Jefferson believed in the existence of a Supreme Being who was the creator and sustainer of the universe and the ultimate ground of being, but this was not the triune deity of orthodox Christianity. He also rejected the idea of the divinity of Christ, but as he writes to William Short on October 31, 1819, he was convinced that the fragmentary teachings of Jesus constituted the "outlines of a system of the most sublime morality which has ever fallen from the lips of man." In correspondence, he sometimes expressed confidence that the whole country would be Unitarian[3], but he recognized the novelty of his own religious beliefs. On June 25, 1819, he wrote to Ezra Stiles Ely, "I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know."
- Rebecca Bowman, Monticello Research Report, August 1997
http://www.monticello.org/site/research-...
I would start with Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
https://www.aynrand.org/novels/capitalis...
Some people really have an incomplete or naïve view of history.
Thank you for your words of support. Which ideas do you think *all* objectisits would disagree with me on? I've only read Fountain Head and AS, and I loved/agreed with most of it. So it suprises me there would be things _all_ objectists disagree w/ me on. It's possible, though, b/c I come up with my own ideas, and I haven't read non-fiction on Objectivism.
http://americanhistory.si.edu/JeffersonB...
This book was a literal cut/paste from bibles and listed out the morality of Jesus and is in essence a transliteration in what appears chronological order tugging and pasting between the 4 Gospels. Wikipedia is not accepted in Collegiate circles as a "real source" either, but might just be good as an index on where to find the REAL sources.
This is a direct Quote from TJ. "I am of a sect by myself, as far
as I know."
— Thomas Jefferson, 1819
So by declaring himself a Sect, he is declaring himself a religion unto himself.
But my point had nothing to do with religion or God, only the disingenuous nature of the liberal mindset based on THEIR construct of No God and the belief in Evolution, and the "Law of Nature", Only the strong survive, which in itself is the antithesis of Welfare and supporting and elevating the poor.
I've probably said this a hundred times. More laws are not the answer, they are the problem. They remove responsibility of the individual. They instill a sense of getting away with it, instead of the shame of doing something "wrong." We have a culture of people who aren't ashamed of living off their neighbor (welfare), of a political class that feels they are so clever (the electorate is too dumb to know we just screwed them), and a business community that seeks profit via cronyism instead of being the best. It is a society that has already failed and is merely waiting to collapse on itself.
"Church clergy and congregations often played a role, especially the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), Congregationalists, Wesleyans, and Reformed Presbyterians as well as certain sects of mainstream denominations such as branches of the Methodist church and American Baptists."
I am not trying to saying Christians were superior in this effort-only stating the fact that many denominations were against slavery as a group. I'm certain individuals disagreed on this. Bt I don't see it as a coordinated religious movement.
That said, many different buddhist lineages have taken this toolbox and turned it into a religion and meshed it with all sorts of gods and rituals (the Tibetans come to mind as a notable example).
Actually, I'm probably closest to a deist. Thinking there might be some consciousness or intelligence behind the whole curtain but that said consciousness does not really care one whit about events on this puny planet.
Here is a wikipedia article about the book:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_B...
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