I stumbled on this today, and towards the end, a very serious Christian decided to use the comic strip as his soapbox for faith – and reliance on other people for his sustenance.
(Oh, and i love the comic strip, so I’m posting it here, again. And clicking on it will take you to the blog. again.)
“Empy” goes on to proclaim his complete self-reliance on an unseen being.
This, is my reply, verbatim: (ok, no, not verbatim, I polished off the roughness, crossed the i’s and dotted the t’s. LOL)
Empy — I know that we can always agree to disagree on this one, so I’ll throw in my two cents.
As a former Christian myself, I understand the value of faith and its ability to sustain us through trying times.
I have to commend you in your unrelenting commitment to what you believe in. For that, you deserve to be respected: in the unrelenting commitment to a belief.
But a life that is without any utter personal accomplishment to speak of (not counting the raising of five children, a herculean task worthy of respect) is not something I would be proud of.
To have nothing to my name, to not have been able to contribute a piece of my mortality to the world, to have not enriched someone’s story through my own, to not have helped someone succeed through my own success, to not have contributed something worthwhile to the fabric of humanity… that’s a life I cannot live.
Nothing compares to the taste of a meal that I earned with my own two hands: be it Wagyu Beef or instant noodles. The sense of pride that comes from putting on a shirt I patched myself, or the ability to step into a Banana Republic to replace a stained one simply because I can. Nothing compares to the pride of opening up the driver’s side window of a beat-up ‘91 Honda that I paid for, in cash, with money I had set aside after 10 gruelling months of 12-hour days.
The meal handed to me by a stranger, the free clothes, the car I received as renumeration simply for idly BEING… how can I take pride in that?
Ah, and now we go into the argument of pride: which we won’t, because what kind of God creates people just to love Him and praise Him. Which leads us into the argument of Agape and organized religion: which we won’t. Because every major dysfunctional war in our history was caused by religion, including 9/11, where many of us lost loved ones.
Selflessness is the new evil. Having no pride in our personal ability to be productive, to think, to use logic, to earn an honest living, to buy, to sell, to own (ourselves): that is the new evil. Laying to waste what paraplegics and landmine survivors only dream of: that is the new evil.
Before this turns into a verbatim quotation of John Galt’s 3-hour mental masturbatory treatise, I leave you with the words of Ayn Rand:
“My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason his only absolute.” – Ayn Rand
And just WHO is John Galt? That, my dear friends (if you are true to the name by which I call you), is what you need to find out, if you haven’t already. A 964-word compression of his 90-page (3-hour) soliloquy can be found here.
…
YES, I CAN BE SERIOUS SOMETIMES! JEEEEEEZ.
Why on Earth do you deride John Galt’s speech, by saying, “… John Galt’s 3-hour mental masturbatory treatise”? What is masturbatory about it? When carefully examined, say using the Ayn Rand Lexicon, and reading other non-fiction articles by Rand, one soon discovers that every idea in the speech is extraordinarily well condensed. As one’s understanding of its various points increases, he finds that each point is enormously more valid than it appeared to be on first or second reading. Is it mental masturbation to learn how logical syllogisms work? Hardly. Your stooping to such an unfounded smear of Galt’s speech says distinctly more about your own mental masturbation than anything about the speech.
Ahhh. A die-hard John Galt believer. LOL.
In no way do I “deride” his speech. Everybody needs release: the entire reason that blogs became popular is because shrinks are too costly. John Galt’s frustration with the world and the subsequent dissection of his frame of thought is a true spectacle, one that I’ve been blessed to have read. But (IMHO), the 964-word condensed version is just as effective, if not more so.
The way I see it, Galt’s speech was, if anything, the single thing that makes him human. I can relate to his frustration. Throughout the book, his superhuman philosophy was the shining beacon of perfection. His city and the tenets by which its residents believed in is the Utopia that many of us Objectivists can only dream of. His soliloquy was the composed thrashing of a man in dire straits of grief and frustration. I can relate to it.
But I need to be able to come to terms with it on my own terms, not have it handed to me, en masse. I do not need to have the Bible, the apocrypha, the gnostic gospels, the torah, the pentateuch, the Koran, the writings of Buddha and Confucius, and the book of Mormon all at one go: and then be asked to condense my belief in 90 pages. One of the most important points in Objectivism is the ability to use logic and reason to think for yourself. That’s what I want to do.
Oh, and I know you and I share the same ideologies, but different opinions on “Atlas Shrugged”. I respectfully have to agree to disagree.
But the next time you post an insult such as this on my own blog:
“Your stooping to such an unfounded smear of Galt’s speech says distinctly more about your own mental masturbation than anything about the speech.”
I will. block. your. ass.
LOL
Bravo luv…
[...] this is a previous post that hammers home the point [...]