Karl Popper called it "monocausotaxophilia". Humans want everything to have a single cause.
Thanks for catching it.
It's been over a decade at this point, but I remember Howard Roarks(?) endless ambitious energy was infectious. Sounds like it's time for another read.
The problem is that for some reason she couldn’t keep it at the fictional level and started thinking maybe the fiction was a good model of reality. That kinda taints a bit the legacy, in my opinion.
The characters didn’t help either. They came across as one-dimensional: the so-called heroes are always right, always rational, while anyone who disagrees with them is portrayed as either stupid or evil. That kind of writing makes it hard for me to take her "philosophy" seriously.
Someone else was burned one too many times. It's fine and dandy until you notice a pattern: others who lack conscience will always work your convictions against you. Though the religion admits as much - it eschews 'worldly wisdom' - i.e. what you need to make anything of a life in this world.
At least, that is how I experienced it.
Uf, that sounds horribel. Reminds me of the mother in C.S. Lewsis Screwtape Letters
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwtape_Letters
I at some point it becomes performative and false. And not very Christian at all
Trying to live in a relationship with a Christian philosophy only works if both parties in the relationship have the same mindset.
It’s a shortcut to being abused if one partner turns the other cheek, and the other keeps on slapping them.
I’m still not sure if this identifies poor partners or a poor outlook.
I now see the conflicts between her and my parents and often she’s like: why don’t they just say what they want? She gets the feeling they do stuff for her/us, but she wants them to do things they like! Of course we really like it if they want to see our children because they like to be with them. Not always because they want to help us out or something indirect. I mean, that’s wat love is right?
My wife is Jewish and was I raised Catholic. I’ve noticed quite recently that she definitely judges actions more in terms of effect and I’m more concerned with people’s motivations/intentions.
And funnily enough I just noticed this explicitly in the Old Testament:
Leviticus 4:1-35 deals explicitly with sacrificial atonement for unwitting offences. The section note in The Jewish Study Bible says: “A basic postulate of Israelite thought is that inadvertent acts are just as harmful as deliberate ones, the need to atone for them just as real, and the desire to do so, once they are realized, greater.”
Raised christian but feeling burned out by the contradictions, the emptiness of trying to live for others (it's killing for relationships I can tell you), the mental struggle to rationalize all the rules, I too felt that spark. I realize dogmatism is always bad but that voice inside keeps saying: It's not when the theory is perfect! The truth is knowable and can be discovered through reason. How super comforting (and damn that Incompleteness Theorem I learned about later).
I don't know what it is, my hunger for a system? For rules to make sense of the world? Whatever it is, Rand's philosophy remains so appealing. It's probably the reason I started a company, walk into meetings now boldly, with a goal, why I enjoy things now, just to enjoy myself. As a rational, healthy human, there is nothing wrong with that, in contrast to what my upbringing tried to instill in me.
Perhaps that's it, it liberated my from a confining worldview. Perhaps another worldview could have done the same.