I guess there’s a bit of a Nelsonic Ha, ha! going on over this bit of month-old “news“:
However, it was revealed in the recent “Oral History of Ayn Rand” by Scott McConnell (founder of the media department at the Ayn Rand Institute) that in the end Ayn was a vip-dipper as well. An interview with Evva Pryror, a social worker and consultant to Miss Rand’s law firm of Ernst, Cane, Gitlin and Winick verified that on Miss Rand’s behalf she secured Rand’s Social Security and Medicare payments which Ayn received under the name of Ann O’Connor (husband Frank O’Connor).
As Pryor said, “Doctors cost a lot more money than books earn and she could be totally wiped out” without the aid of these two government programs. Ayn took the bail out even though Ayn “despised government interference and felt that people should and could live independently… She didn’t feel that an individual should take help.”
Well, there, we have a seething indictment. A thirty-year-old memory from a social worker recounted on Huffington Post. I should burn my first edition of The Fountainhead in protest.
Well, no.
The same people who bring you The political is the personal also like to bring you The principle is the person, whereby if someone does not adhere to the principle, the principle is disproved. I mean, really. Try a little cogitation, fellows.
All it proves if it’s proved that Ayn Rand took the government money means is that Ayn Rand did not live up to the principle that government redistribution of individual wealth is wrong.
Ayn Rand also alluded to the inviolability of a person’s word, but was prone to violating the particular contract/promise of marriage in her writing and in her own life when some better piece of sex came along. That doesn’t prove that infidelity is okay (Robert B. Parker novels and their hundreds of cumulative conversations between main characters who and their therapists prove that).
Christians grasp this easily, as they believe the ten commandments are absolute and acknowledge that they break them. To the same bit of sophists, this represents HYPOCRISY!!!! which is some sort of rhetorical wild card that they like, but it doesn’t come from the same deck as reason.
Some others have tried to build an argument from the Word of Rand, but that’s not even necessary. Trying to argue against the charge of hypocrisy gets one onto a Möbius strip of the other side’s choosing. You cannot disprove hypocrisy. You shouldn’t even answer it seriously.
Ayn Rand also alluded to the inviolability of a person’s word, but was prone to violating the particular contract/promise of marriage in her writing and in her own life when some better piece of sex came along. That doesn’t prove that infidelity is okay (Robert B. Parker novels and their hundreds of cumulative conversations between main characters who and their therapists prove that).
Christians grasp this easily, as they believe the ten commandments are absolute and acknowledge that they break them. To the same bit of sophists, this represents HYPOCRISY!!!! which is some sort of rhetorical wild card that they like, but it doesn’t come from the same deck as reason.
I get that, but I think that it can be overstated or at least too easily used.
The truth of Christianity cannot be proven by logic, history, or archaeology. It is only evidenced by a Church living a life that is radically different from the World and then holding aloft the Bible saying “We are different because of the message in this book.”
If the Church is morally indistinguishable from the World, then the Christian message is not authenticated. And the less distinguishable is the Church from the World — that is, the more hypocrisy that is demonstrated — the less reason people have to take Christianity seriously.
So, yes, Christians may point out that they are sinners saved only by grace and sometimes break their own publicly espoused moral standards. They should “grasp this easily”. But they should be embarrassed that it is necessary.