SataYnism

Last week, after a religious conference, Paul Ryan was chased down by a young Catholic dude and offered a Bible, which Ryan turned down. The young Catholic asked Ryan why he preferred the extreme ideology of Ayn Rand over the economic teachings in the Bible. Here’s the vid:

 

A group called American Values Network created an ad which attacks politicians who have been inspired by Ayn Rand and uses her anti-Christian statement from a 1959 interview with Mike Wallace.

At the beginning of the clip Ayn Rand says she regards religion as evil. However, many would say that Ayn Rand has inspired "evil". This is very ironic, because what hasn’t been discussed in public yet is how Ayn Rand also inspired modern American Satanism.

Howard Stanton Levey became Anton Szandor LaVey and founded the Church of Satan and authored the Satanic Bible. As the Wikipedia article on LaVey states, LaVey created a “synthesized system of his understanding of human nature and the insights of philosophers who advocated materialism and individualism, for which he claimed no supernatural, metaphysical, or theistic inspiration.”

Ayn Rand’s “Objectivism” is just a fancy word for material selfishness. As John Kenneth Galbraith said, "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."

Rand’s atheism is no doubt from her upbringing in “godless” Russia. And It is perhaps convenient for the purposes of her Objectivism philosophy, which, given it promotes a self-serving series of choices should actually, it seems, be called Subjectivism.

But the compassion of Christ—obviously missing in many Christians—runs counter to Rand’s Objectivism. And it is perhaps also missing in many of LaVey’s followers. I hesitate to claim that as a truth because I’ve never met a Satanist that I can remember.

It is ironic that so many conservatives worship Ayn Rand because in 1979 on the old Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder, she told Snyder that "conservatives will destroy this country".  You can find that clip on YouTube.

So, what many of us have believed for decades finally has a correlation: right-wing conservatives are evil and probably more so than Satanists because right-wing politicians are power hungry and persecute the weak and vulnerable.

Even Ayn Rand knew that--which goes for some liberals as well. And that is me being as "objectivistic" as I can possibly be.

Paul Ryan's Sick Joke

 

“A Senior walks into a hospital looking for treatment and steps up to the nurse’s desk. The Nurse asks, ‘May I help you?’ The Senior says, ‘I can’t breathe, I’m coughing up blood and my Paul Ryan-Medicare substitute voucher’s out of money, can you help me?’ The Nurse says, ‘I have some good news and I have some bad news.’ The Senior says, ‘What’s the good news?’ The Nurse says, ‘The good news is I know what’s wrong. You have cancer.’ The Senior says, ‘That’s the good news?? What’s the bad news?’ The Nurse says, ‘The bad news is we could cure you but your voucher’s out of money.’
 
Because of all the hits yesterday's blog received, I decided to put the joke in its proper context.

Playing the Ol' Class Card

What’s the future of America, and the world for that matter, when it comes to the widening gulf between the rich and poor?

The recent and continuing attempts to throw off the yoke of dictators, whether Middle Eastern, or Wisconsin anti-union means the “man” ain’t gonna be too happy until they get everyone under submission again.

When Martin Luther King Jr. became the leader of the Civil Rights Movement the concept of “playing the race card” had not been invented because the Civil Rights Movement was creating a whole new deck for a whole new game. Since the 70s, to my memory, there were many times when blacks—and whites for that matter—were accused of “playing the race card”.

The lack of respect for the needs of poor and vulnerable is reaching a fevered pitch in this country. It seems that the time may not be far off when politicians and activists in talking about their concern for poor people and complaining about the lack of respect that Republicans, and some Democrats, have for them that they will be accused of playing the “class card”, or the “poor card”.

For two years, racist jokes about our first black president have been making the circuit on the internet and through emails. And with contempt for the poor and the vulnerable so obvious in the GOP’s push to privatize Medicare, it seems to me we are not far from seeing classist jokes from being discovered in Congressmen’s emails.

For example, jokes like, “A Senior walks into a hospital looking for treatment and steps up to the nurse’s desk. The Nurse asks, ‘May I help you?’ The Senior says, ‘I can’t breathe, I’m coughing up blood and my Paul Ryan-Medicare substitute voucher’s out of money, can you help me?’ The Nurse says, ‘I have some good news and I have some bad news.’ The Senior says, ‘What’s the good news?’ The Nurse says, ‘The good news is I know what’s wrong. You have cancer.’ The Senior says, ‘That’s the good news?? What’s the bad news?’ The Nurse says, ‘The bad news is we could cure you but your voucher’s out of money.’”