I am not an Atheist because I read Ayn Rand back in the 70s.   Matter of fact, I didn’t start acknowledging to myself that I had become atheist until a few years ago. For decades I considered myself an agnostic in the manner of Spinzoa, or Frank Lloyd Wright, who once said he believed in God but he spelled it Nature.   I still love that quote.   But it was actually many years after Ronald Reagan showed me what a world where people who believed that money equals morality actually looks like and I walked away from Rand, that I realized I had become Atheist.   And I would really object if someone told me that I wasn’t an atheist if I didn’t embrace Rand’s philosophy.

Actually, I object to her opinions even being called philosophy.   What she had was a jerking knee about anything that smacked of basic human unconditional sympathy.   She was a sociopath, at one point idealizing a child murderer who grotesquely dismembered his victim’s body, wired her eyes open to make it appear that she was alive when found, and scattered pieces of her body around to taunt the police.   I remember when I first read about this and how unsurprising it was by then.   It is no coincidence that her ideas are embraced today by sociopaths, wealthy and otherwise alike.   And…new generations of useful idiots, like I was once.

Anyway…From Fred Clark…

Ayn Rand claimed that her philosophy was the One True Faith for anyone who does not subscribe to religious faith. She said that what she called “Objectivism” — the “virtue of selfishness” and a vehement rejection of altruism — was the only Real, True Atheism. Anyone who claimed to be an atheist, but refused to follow her particular program, therefore, wasn’t the genuine article.

That’s malarkey, though.

And it would be dreadfully foolish for me, as a Christian, to accept this Randian assertion as the One True Definition of Atheism…

Likewise…

That would be like … like … oh, let’s say like recognizing the delusional dishonesty of everything Ken Ham has to say about science and history, but then turning around and declaring him to be correct and authoritative when it comes to biblical interpretation and hermeneutics.

Just so.   Some words are really big.   Christian and Atheist being two pretty big words.   And there are lots of other really big words. And they’re not always descriptive in the way people think they are.   Gay is a big word, especially when it’s another word for Homosexual.

I’ve had people tell me I am still an agnostic because I won’t say that I know for a fact there is no god, which is less objectionable but still…no.   I really really doubt there is a supreme being that created the universe and everything in it, but that I am always willing to acknowledge that someday I might find myself walking along Newton’s beach and pick up one of those prettier than ordinary seashells and find God inside and go Oh…there you were…, does not make me an agnostic. I just…don’t believe.   There’s a word for that.   But it’s a big one.   Like “Christian”.