Ayn Rand was an ungodly humanist with an unrepentant and sinful mind. She was accursed by God and at enmity with God, and is no role model for anyone professing Christianity.
Says the woman who's mind is broken and who has not read one single chapter of anything Rand ever wrote.
She was no more accursed than any other unbeliever and far less evil than probably half a dozen authors you have no problem with at all.
She was an unbeliever and very much did hate what she understood as Christianity but that doesn't mean that everything she wrote was evil or even false. What she got wrong, she got wrong and what she got right she got right. It takes a thinking mind and careful discernment to separate one from the other. But that can be said of any author you care to name, including Calvin and Shakespear and Dean Koontz!
As to the subject at hand, I believe in double predestination while I deny God is the author of sin. That is because I can understand the difference between ordaining and causing.
Explain it then.
God created man.
Man sinned.
God ordained both, but Adam is held responsible for causing sin and death to enter creation. Romans 5:12
If Adam is held responsible by God for that which he had no ability to avoid doing because of the way in which God created him then God would be unjust. God is just! Therefore, your doctrine is false!
There is no getting around that, Nang. You and all your Augustinian buddies can dance around the obvious meaning of simple English words all you like but there are lots and lots of people in Hell right now, Rand being one of them, because they refused to believe in any God at all
because of your irrational, fundamentally unjust and false version of Him.
"Your code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice. It demands, as his first proof of virtue, that he accept his own depravity without proof. It demands that he start, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good is that which he is not.
It does not matter who then becomes the profiteer on his renounced glory and tormented soul, a mystic God with some incomprehensible design or any passer-by whose rotting sores are held as some inexplicable claim upon him—it does not matter, the good is not for him to understand, his duty is to crawl through years of penance, atoning for the guilt of his existence to any stray collector of unintelligible debts, his only concept of a value is a zero: the good is that which is non-man.
The name of this monstrous absurdity is Original Sin.
A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man’s sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold man’s nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched. Yet that is the root of your code." - Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged Part 3 Chapter 7
How would you answer Rand's argument, Nang? In fact, since B57 is clearly incapable of answering my question, why don't you give it a shot. How would you answer if an unbeliever asked you the following questions...
What is justice?
When you hear of a judgment from a normal human court of law, how do you decide whether that judgment was just or unjust? Or when a parent punishes their children for some wrong doing or rewards them for doing rightly, how do you know a good parent from a bad one?
Is it the parent that sends their child to their room when they talk back the good parent or is it the one who punches the child in the stomach (so as to not leave bruises) for the same offense?
Is it the parent that gives a child anything he asks for the good parent or is it the one who rewards the child when he's done something worthy of being rewarded?
Does the same or at least a similar standard of justice apply to God?
If so, in what way is the God you describe just?
If not, in what way is it meaningful to call the God you describe just and what does it mean when the bible instructs us to be godly?
Resting in Him,
Clete
