Tea Party Group Tells Objectivists Where to Go

Some Tea Party "patriots" got bitchy about an Objectivist group that wanted to join their coalition. Surprise, surprise. A group of Minnesota Objectivists tried to join the coalition that made up the local Tea Party. The Christians that control the Tea Party had fits and eventually the Objectivists withrdrew. Had this "Objectivist" group had paid any attention to Rand they would know that the Tea Party is not a group that they should join and would not have the humiliation of retreating.

Rand thought multi-issue coalitions were unstable and bad ideas and that one would get dragged into the mud on the issues where one’s allies were bad. Second, she despised conservatives, especially religious conservatives. She referred to them as the "God-Family-Tradition swamp." Third, Rand thought that attempting to justify capitalism or individual rights on the basis of religion would backfire because it implied there is no rational justification for these ideas, only mystical inventions.

Now, one Tea Party writer, Walter Hudson, tries to defend Rand to the Tea Party. What a crock! He claims that the reason these advocates of irrationalism attacked the Objectivist group is because "attacks upon religious expression by a relentless secular minority have placed many religious people on the defensive.” For people on the defensive, they spend a lot of time being offensive, in every sense of the word. I would like to see a list of these attacks on religious expression.

How the Right & Left Misuse Jesus.

Jesus is one of those figures who is used to justify just about everything.  Hitler appealed to Jesus, as have multiple socialists. The Religious Right drops Jesus at the drop of the hat to justify anything they do.

So it was with interest that I read Phil Zuckerman’s take on how evangelicals “hate Jesus.” Zuckerman’s thesis is that evangelicals misinterpret Jesus in order to attach their political agenda to him. They do.

But then Zuckerman appears to do the same thing. After reading his essay I assumed he wanted to use Jesus to support his political agenda. The first clue was that he misstates what Jesus said, or didn’t say, as much as the people he opposes.

He claims evangelicals “are the group least likely to support politicians or policies that reflect the actual teachings of Jesus.” Of course, the “actual” teachings of Jesus are all left wing, if one accepts Zuckerman’s views.

Zuckerman wants a Jesus who is left wing. Most evangelicals want a Jesus who is right wing. But the reality is that Jesus had no real politics at all. He had an ethical system that simply wasn’t made for this world. Particularly he had no economic perspective at all. The ethics of Jesus implied an anti-capitalistic viewpoint. But that doesn’t allow us to jump to the opposite conclusion either. This is not to say that multiple Christians haven’t tried to use Jesus to push a socialist agenda. They have.

Natural law, theology and good government.

It is sometimes claimed that “natural law” theory is inherently Christian. This simply is not correct, though it is true that Christians, especially Thomistic Catholics, later adopted some aspect of natural law theory. In his work, Natural Law, A.P. d’Entréves said that: “The Thomistic interpretation of Christianity is unthinkable without the notion of natural law.” But natural law originated in Greek culture. According to d’Entréves, the theologian E. Troeltsch, wrote that natural law was “an alien element in Christianity” and represented “the inheritance of the ancient world which could be adapted to Christian teaching.”

Prof. Paul Conkin, in Self-Evident Truths, writes: “Natural-law theories originated in Greek philosophy. Plato and Aristotle affirmed not only a formal logical order in the world but an inherent purposefulness in all things. Nature stood for both the order and the purpose. Aristotle’s universe was one vast congeries of yearnings, of informed objects moving toward their own perfection and, in a sense, trying to imitate the objects above them in a chain of being stretching to a perfect mind which pulls all things toward it. Man, by his intellect, can grasp the formal truth in objects, can understand the structure of the universe. More importantly he can understand himself, grasp his own nature, which is also to perceive his own highest good.”