What Do You Think Of Christians Appropriating Ayn Rands Ideas

> It is hard to imagine, however, what principal of Objectivism they could even hope to adopt.

It’s hard for Christians to get across to atheists that we honestly believe God isn’t just some mystical, personal, feel-good father figure we want to see someday when we die. Objectivism holds that explanatory power because her philosophy is based on the same foundations as our faith: faith in the real, not in fantastic hopes. That is the principle of Objectivism which we insist upon.

We believe God is objectively real, the foundation of the universe and all which science has discovered. We believe Him a being of infinite intelligence, building worlds and galaxies and the amazing complexity of the human body and mind, in the same way an architect builds buildings: plan, gather the materials, and build it for a purpose.

We believe there is more than enough evidence, if one looks with eyes clear and not blinded by unreasoning hate. We believe that taking the beautifully engineered universe as it is, not as we’d like to have it, puts one on a collision course with a Jesus who Ayn Rand would have recognized as the ideal Man she sought if she had looked at Him.

I say “Christians,” but there are two types of Christians: those who believe the Bible is objectively true and those who believe it to be subjectively true. The latter always slide into leftist politics. I only talk here about the former. The latter are stuck on the collectivist definition of faith, evidence-free hope, which requires a mob to believe for it to be true. They cannot easily be saved because they believe in belief.

Instead of looking at the Man and the evidence, she looked at His followers who He Himself called lost sheep, who Nietzsche bemoaned as followers of a dead and powerless God. She saw a “church” built by the compromisers, the parasites, the people who think Jesus was the first socialist. She saw a “church” originally planned as a place of air, light, freedom, and wonder by a Builder more passionate than Howard Roark, but remade as a cathedral by Constantine in the image of Greece, as if redesigned by Snyte’s compromising collaborators until it was a mish-mash of previous religions with nothing worthy or original left, and the cathedral became a suffocating place of gloom lit by dim wax candles and devoted to servitude. She rightly rejected that false church because of its emptiness, futility and hypocrisy, but with it she also rejected the Builder’s original plans without looking at them.

I wish, oh I wish, that she’d gotten the opportunity to talk with C.S. Lewis instead of seeing in his writing only what she expected to see. If she’d looked just a little closer to his words, she’d have seen him hating the same empty men she hated for the same reasons.