Ayn Rand & Christianity

How can I be so inspired by both Christianity and Ayn Rand?

An Article by The American Refugee

Many TEA Partiers love Ayn Rand.  We adore her novels and many of us were profoundly changed by Atlas Shrugged.  Some people are confused by the popularity of Ayn Rand and aspects of her objectivism among Christian TEA Party conservatives.  As a Christian and Catholic, who is a constitutionalist conservative, I don’t have that problem.  I am absolutely inspired by Ayn Rand and pray that she found Jesus in the moments before her death.

America is rooted in rugged individualism and liberty as well as Judeo Christian morality and aspects of altruism.  Forced charity, by the state, is not charity at all.  It is tyranny.  It harms both those who have their money confiscated against their will and those who become dependent on what is not a safety net, but a dependency trap.

Ayn Rand tells us to act in our own rational self interest.  Christ taught us to love our enemies.  Love is a verb.  We love people by putting our desires aside and doing what is best for the other.  These two concepts are not contradictory.  Doing what is best for the other person rarely involves giving that person money.  It often doesn’t involve giving that person what he is asking for.  It sometimes involves doing something for him that he will curse you for.

We receive benefits each time we act in the interest of others. We experience good feelings, friendship, and experience the emotional form of love. Believers also believe that they are pleasing God by doing His will. There is no escaping that the fact of the matter is, that it is in our rational self interest to “Do unto others”. It is in our rational self interest to live by the will of God. It is in our rational self interest to ignore the selfish desires of our flesh and work for the glory of God and the betterment of others.

There is no doubt that Rand was an atheist.  I am not trying to minimize the difference between Rand and believers.  I am simply stating that most of Rand’s ideas are not at war with Christianity in the way many Objectivist Purists and liberals think.  Rand unfortunately only knew reason, and not faith, but the two are not incompatible.  Reason has lead me to many of the same places that faith has.

We do the moochers no good when we feed them.  We enable them in their destructive lifestyles.  We can help them by not denying them the dignity of the consequences of their own mistakes.  We can help them by opening a business, encouraging them to work for a living ,and offering them a job.  We teach them to fish rather than giving them fish.

At the same time, there are suffering children and those who are too broken to be able to take care of themselves.  We do a moral good, when we help them of our own free will.  We are not being heroes. We are simply acting in our own rational self interest.

 

Come be a part of our Christmas Party with a purpose on Monday, 12/23 and #PrayToEndAbortion Here

MERRY CHRISTMAS from THE AMERICAN REFUGEES

Please Donate to help us cover costs.

Participating is very easy.  Simply go to http://patriotjournalist.com/VideoChat/RedMeat/?src=Home  during the event.  Login by hitting the Twitter icon on the screen.  We will welcome you and teach you how to do everything from there.  You'll meet great people, send out great prolife tweets and be RT'd a  surprising number of times.  We will have prayer, fellowship, and fun all while working to get as many people as possible to #PrayToEndAbortion and trying to trend the hashtag.  There will be Christmas music, prayer, tweeting, retweeting, chat, and video chat.  Those who don't want to join us at the RedMeat SteakHouse can still support the cause by praying and by tweeting as many prolife tweets using the #PrayToEndAbortion hashtag as they can, from the hours of 7pm - 11pm ET.  Don't feel like you have to stay for the whole event.  Many people will pop in and out all evening.  We'd love to have you, if only for a few minutes.

How To Be a Leader of our 12/23 2013 #PrayToEndAbortion MeetUp/TweetUp

Before the Event:

1. Personally invite 10 people to join us at http://patriotjournalist.com/VideoChat/RedMeat/?src=Home on 12/23/12 for an hour or two between 7&11pm ET Monday, 12/23.
2. Commit to me by e-mail to be there either from 7-9 or from 9-11 ET (AmericanRefugee@TheAmericanRefugees.com)
3. Tweet a good pro-life tweet of 80 characters or less within the next few days and make me aware of it.  We’ll be harvesting these tweets and adding the hashtags to use as featured tweets during our event.  I'm @mericanrefugee on Twitter.
4. If God puts it in your heart to do so, please donate any amount here and leave a note that this is for the #PrayToEndAbortion event.  There are costs associated with using the RedMeat Chat Room and this will help us to cover those costs.
5. Listen to this archived radio broadcast which will teach you how to use the RedMeat Chat Room.
6. Go to The Red Meat Steak House and familiarize yourself with the room and it’s functions.  Remember, it will currently not be set up for our event.  During the event, all the featured tweets will be #PrayToEndAbortion tweets.
7. Make whatever arrangements you have to so that you are certain to be there.  As a leader of the event, we are absolutely depending on you to be there.

 

DURING THE EVENT:

1. Go to The RedMeat Steak House at Patriot Journalist a few minutes early.
2. Ignore the user name and password box on the login screen.  Login my clicking on the twitter icon to login with your twitter account.  If you'd like me to  be your coach throughout the event and answer any questions you have, make sure you hit the camera icon next to my name in the roster, so you can see and hear me.
   
3. If you feel comfortable broadcasting yourself, click the camera icon above the roster and then give the application permission to turn on your camera.  If you don’t have a camera or don’t feel comfortable doing this, don’t worry about it.
4. Pay close attention to the roster to see if people you invited show up.  If they do, talk to them in the chat. Make them feel comfortable and welcome by teaching them how to use the room.
5. You will see the tweets at the top of the page with the tweet boxes next to them.  Hit each of the tweet buttons once over the course of the night.  Notice that there are a few pages of Tweet buttons and go to those pages.  You can send out the tweets all at once, or gradually.  Over the course of the evening, you will hit the RT buttons next to the tweets.  This will pull up a list of each of the people who have tweeted that tweet.  Then you simply go down the line and RT them all.  This is a big part of the magic of the room.  Everybody’s tweets get retweeted many times.
6. Have fun.  There will be people sharing in the chat and people broadcasting with their cameras.  It will be a working, pro-life, Christmas party.  There will also be videos playing.  If you don’t want to see a particular video, you can pause or mute the video.  Each time a new video starts you can either watch and listen or you can hit the stop button.

Goals Of The Event

2Chronicles 7:14 if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.

• At the end of the event I will pray a rosary and I hope many of the Catholics in the room will join me.  Non Catholics are encouraged to have a prayer event themselves at the end.  This will be an interfaith event and all prayers are welcome.
• We hope to get as many people as possible actually praying to end abortion.  We will have prayers throught the event.
• We hope to raise awareness on twitter about the prolife cause and the importance of prayer. If we can trend #PrayToEndAbortion nationally, that will be a huge achievement.  If we can’t but we cause even one person to truly #PrayToEndAbortion, we have still been successful.
• Let’s network with one another and have a good time. This is a Christmas season gathering of pro-life believers.  I hope people will gain new friends and add more followers on Twitter.  We will have fellowship and support one another.
• Who knows? Maybe one young lady in a difficult situation will be inspired to pray and change her mind.  We might just save a life.