There is no rational point by those invoking it. It is more obnoxious religious proselytizing gratuitously interjected in a forum where it does not belong.

Yes gridlock is better than more bad laws. But it isn't enough because so many have already been passed. We can't repeal them with gridlock either, and they are hurting people badly, especially with an executive running Federal agencies as his own private legislature making up new rules regardless of Congress. So while gridlock helps against more bad laws from Congress, it doesn't stop more bad "laws" and interpretations progressively imposed to destroy more victims and causing the country to further decline.

Identifying faith as the opposite of reason and the attempt to obtain knowledge without regard to or in spite of evidence and proof does characterize it "as it is". There is no 'sixth sense' on which to base what you call a "positive".

You wrote "You don't have to agree 100% with someone philosophically to work with them politically" and "If the only way you can look at someone who isn't 100% Objectivist is with contempt, you're going to be a lousy missionary of Objectivism." That is a belligerent strawman irrelevant to the discussion. Faith is 100% the opposite of reason and Ayn Rand's philosophy. Rejecting it for the hopeless destruction that it is does not mean requiring 100% agreement with Ayn Rand's philosophy to work with someone politically. This is not about being a "missionary". The most effective conservatives engaged in valuable political action on legitimate issues, such as property rights, do not interject religion into their activities. Effective action requires focus and relevancy.

Every politics presupposes an ethics and epistemology. A proper political philosophy is based on a proper philosophy of reason and egoism identifying and justifying a limited government defending the rights of the individual left free to live his own life. That is not "legislating morality" in personal choices. Trying to turn government into a means of enforcement of religious injunctions and interference in personal freedom is statist theocracy.

Jehova's Witnesses are obnoxious and everyone knows it, even most who consider themselves as Christian. Their attempt to appear "polite" does not make their persistence any less of a nuisance and the same goes for the militant religious proselytizing here with the same evangelist mentality, except that it doesn't even qualify as polite.

Religion does not belong in politics in this country. The militant religious conservatives' attempt to change that based on their own false philosophy only illustrates the destructive nature of both their philosophy and its consequent actions in politics.

Interjecting evangelism into political issues is worse than irrelevant. If you expect political alliances with those who reject your religion then keep your religion out of it and stop demanding that we go along with it for the sake of an "alliance". There can be no alliance with theocrats politically trying to ban the right of abortion and scientific research with cells, and there can be no alliance with those who gratuitously and militantly promote and evangelize religion grafted onto political action.

You did not "logically and rationally reasoned there is a God" and Ayn Rand's philosophy does not support that whether or not the ghosts fly.

Ayn Rand's philosophy will not evolve into something else. It is what she formulated and will always be that.

I think he's struggling to make sense of these epistemological issues despite a damaging education. Recovery does not come easily and not everyone has spent years studying Ayn Rand's epistemology.

Language is not an end in itself, it is (properly) employed as a means to represent knowledge. It is primarily for cognition and secondarily for communication. "Cognition precedes communication". You can't think, let alone communicate thoughts, without a way to symbolize ideas in a concrete mental form. That is the function of language. Language misused with invalid concepts and false or misleading statements can be either mistaken or dishonest. Using it to attack reason is too big a 'mistake' to be innocent.

Reason is a faculty of the mind for using concepts based in reality. A conniver can employ reason for his devious ends, but rationalism and sophistry are not valid thinking processes as a way to obtain or defend knowledge. It's not so much a matter of "benevolence" as objectivity in thought. You can think rationally without regard to being benevolent in your ends, and a rationalist can employ his invalid habitual verbal manipulations with or without intending to deceive.

The Bush wing of the Republican party is real conservative. They are trying to conserve establishment conditions to keep the game going for a while longer, afraid of significant reform and conceding morality to the left and as they drift behind them with "me-too" policies to implement them more slowly. Anyone can see what they are up to, which is why they are so ineffective. The more intellectual conservatives are also real conservatives Some of them advocate more freedom but not consistently and don't know how to defend it when they do support it, relying on implicit but not expressed premises, plus the usual shallow and disastrous faith and family, depravity and tradition arguments that haven't made a dent in the foundation for the left.

She just explained that in the video, and elsewhere. The conservative arguments from faith, tradition, and depravity are not better than her philosophy of reason and egoism. You can't "meld" a philosophy with its opposite. There are political issues discussed by conservatives, sometimes properly, that Ayn Rand did not address, usually because they were not known at the time in the form they are today, but she did addressed and emphasized fundamental principles. .She used to emphasize that her ideas systematically challenged 2000 years of philosophy.

Emotions are very important. Ayn Rand did not deny them, she recognized that emotions are not tools of cognition. And that is not always rejected out of misunderstanding of what she meant.

It is very similar to her essay "Conservatism: An Obituary" in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, which in turn was based on a lecture she gave at Princeton. The reading in the video may have been the Princeton version.

'Conservative' and 'liberal' are both imprecise terms with vague uses. She was talking about the dominant means employed by conservatives to defend capitalism and freedom, and we still see it everywhere today. The appeals to a god as an alleged defense and source of rights is a standard conservative slogan. Most conservatives still appeal to altruism and religion as the source of ethics and dare not defend self interest as a fundamental ethical principle.

We still here repeatedly the Hayek line trying to defend freedom because no one is good enough to be a dictator, and of course the a-philosophical appeals to "tradition" are everywhere. The attempts to defend limited government by appealing to "the founders" because they said it, and to "faith", with no regard for a philosophical basis and explanation, and rarely even a mention of the Enlightenment, are all around us from conservatives. Another form of the "tradition" argument is the Pragmatist version appealing to "experience" of what "works" with no regard of the standard of deciding what works with respect to what goal, as if "experience" is all that must be mentioned as a principle.

None of that is principled argument against collectivism and the statism required to enforce it, which is why so many conservatives are helpless to argue against the moral case of the left and is why they so often sanction and promote the welfare state themselves.

Conservatives also argue particular political and economic consequences, but have no defense of the basic moral principles on which they rest their arguments for freedom (when not arguing for statism themselves), and that is what Ayn Rand was talking about.

Knowledge is not "revealed" to us. You have to learn how to use your reason to acquire knowledge. That is not faith in reason. You use your faculty of reason to know, including know the nature of your faculty of reason once you know enough to think philosophically and scientifically.

The limitations of reason are not a problem. Anything that exists has a specific identity, which limits it to what it is and nothing else. That is not a problem, it's a fundamental fact. If your reason had no identity it wouldn't exist. The "limited" nature of reason is your specific means of knowing anything as the distinctly human form of conscious awareness.

Knowledge does not mean omniscience. Being aware of the world does not mean taking everything in a giant mystic insight. Your five senses are limited to the identity of each in the kinds of sense data of which you can be aware. Your are your means of detecting sounds of a particular kind. Your eyes are your means of detecting electromagnetic radiation in a certain part of the spectrum. Your ears don't detect ultra high frequencies and your eyes don't detect electromagnetic radiation outside the range of 'visible light' from red to purple.

Your ability to think conceptually allows you to discover much more, from a finite base of knowledge, but always still "limited" to what it is. There is always more to discover and more to learn. If we were not "limited" to something in particular, we wouldn't be anything, i.e., would not exist. Omniscience versus total ignorance is a false alternative and both are impossible. Omniscience means beyond any limit, i.e., no identity, i.e., does not exist. Total ignorance would mean you would have no reasoning power, i.e., would not be human.

Reason is not subjective unless it is misused by a subjectivist employing improper thinking. Of course we use reason to act. Action is always an act in the present that leads to the future.

The attempt to claim reason is only for the past and faith is required to act is a profound philosophical skepticism that is self-refuting. It is a consequence of abandoning reason for faith. Faith is not a source of knowledge, leaving one with no way to know, i.e., skepticism. Skepticism also follows an inability to understand how to think, leading some to in turn embrace a leap into faith because they can't find anything else. Either way the consequences are devastating.

Existence exists. Life and individual happiness is the point.

Mitch, They vote, and often they vote the way God instructs them to, either through their own 'God Senses' or those of someone else who has allegedly stronger 'God Senses'.

Well, it's because he 'believes' it and he has 'faith' that it's true, and because reality interferes with that belief and trust in faith he then conflates 'reason' which is a process of the mind, with something or the lack of something which are ways of describing concepts, and then add in a little bit of time (before), a scientific measurement--if all of that sounds a little confusing, that's his intent. If you are confused then he can answer because God, which by definition is beyond human comprehension, and there you have it. Tah-Dah!'

Does anyone gain any actual, factual knowledge from that which will help him deal with his life in reality? Well no, but that's kind of the intent, you see. Now you'll be ready to support him so that he can explain all of this again to you on Sunday and maybe vote the way he tells you that God, who you can't comprehend or hear, but he can, told him to instruct you to vote that way, and keep supporting him so he can keep explaining to you how to live so that someday, after you die, and can't call him on it if he lied to you, you'll be able to meet God.

He's just made you his slave.

As he is on many words and concepts he tries to use and *'confabulate' all of us with.

Exactly.

No, semantics does not imply equivalence and sophistry is not just a different way of reasoning. I'm beginning to think you might be English language challenged.

We've been sold that route a few times before. Remember Newt and the 'Welfare to Work' program. Let's see, that lasted till Bush and then was totally destroyed under Obama. No one even thinks of that anymore.

So sure, let's take the crumbs that are offered and just keep on losing more individual freedom.

Yes ewv.

There's a big difference between 'the conscious' and 'a conscience'.

The conscious generally means the 'I', the ego, self awareness. Reasoning is a process of the mind. Rational, logical, reasoning is that process, performed in a disciplined, systemized method to reach a truth, and tied to the reality we live in, and communicable to others. And yes, the study of consciousness is not only worth of scientific investigation, and has been subjected to that investigation for several decades and is ongoing.