Feeling Randy

Ayn Rand’s re-translation of Aristotle’s logic, ethics, and aesthetics into modern parlance is invaluable. However, she seems to have followed some trails and assumed they are the only possible ones. Atheism is one of those. Scores of Randies think that atheism is the only rational alternative simply because it fits with what they’ve learned from Rand. But, of course, that’s a fallacy. It would only be the only rational alternative in a positivistic world – one in which the only thing we know is what we’ve gleaned from what we already know. And no one lives that way, least of all Randites.

Rand has a lot to say that we should listen to about the use of force (extortion, compulsion, etc) and about, without most readers hearing it, Death.

“I can get along with a Randite” – Bernardo de la Paz.

I consider Rand a mentor, and I’ve read her analysis of religion, which is why I think both that she would make a welcome addition to the faithful, and why I suspect she never really absorbed the significance of Orthodox thought in her Communist and Jewish Russian experience. Her commentary seems absorbed primarily with late-Western forms of Christianity, and perhaps just a smells and bells interaction with Russian Orthodoxy. She didn’t have a Vladimir Lossky to translate our thinking into modern parlance and, by the time she could have, her ideas were already well-formed and she was committed to her path.

But I pray for Ayn. And ask that she receive mercy, because she tried to reach the truth and got there in some respects, but also got sidelined, perhaps by pride and loneliness, as I would have. And if the Lord will have mercy on her, perhaps he will have mercy on me by her prayers.

“Pancho needs your prayers, it’s true. But save a few for Lefty, too. He only did what he had to do, and now he’s growing old.” – Towns Van Zandt

If you should think of her, pray for Ayn Rand.