The bitch in question.

It was the one thing that was different in his presentation. A dare. One I’m inclined to take the more I think of it.

After all, he’s putting her up against the idea of God.

Ridiculous.

I’ve been compared to a dying Ford tractor, incapable of mustering any response. Except, you know, the farting noises of a rusted engine trying to turn over.

Well, I may be old, slow, averse to living in the Mylie Cyrus universe, more content to behold my yard than live in Obama’s America, but that doesn’t mean I’m dead or hiding. It means I’ve chosen differently than those who wish to combat totalitarianism with totalitarianism.

Complete rebuttal. For those who have a grain of sense.

Let’s see. What do we know about human life on earth? Pretty much, the people who know everything, the people who are absolutely sure they know everything about how everyone else should live, are wrong.

The idea of God is the dissent from that kind of arrogance. It’s to say that there’s a standard higher than our smartest smarts. Something about what it means to be good.

It happens early in life. Mothers and fathers teach children what good is and expect their offspring to remember. Am I going too quickly for you?

I’ll try to go slower. Things I’ve said before but have never been understood. Like capitalism and Marxism are both morally neutral in their structural prescriptions, with one exception. Marxism puts people in charge, with an insistence that there is no God. Capitalism also puts people in charge, but it doesn’t say anything at all about whether there’s a God or not.

They’re both just systems of economics. The big difference is that Marxism despises and denies God, and capitalism is neutral on the question.

This is not an inconsequential difference. Any atheist philosophy must establish and maintain authority over the question of what is right and what is wrong. It doesn’t matter how idealistic they are at the onset of this task. What matters is that when morality is left to human hands, corruption, oppression, and totalitarianism become inevitable. No hero leader or human institution can withstand the conversion of simple verities to man-made laws. The law doesn’t ever know where to stop. The leading lights never know when to shut up and let people make up their own minds. As long as morality is strictly a human responsibility, there will be human beings who will play God.

The first proof that the bitch is wrong. Look at that sour face. No laugh lines there. It’s a tough job being a human god. No wiggle room for a wink or a nod at a miracle. There’s this overpowering need to explain and control everything, to be all knowing. You can see it in the writings of most everyone who would do without god. The instantaneous leap from rational reasonableness to certainty and from there to pompous contempt. Why Rand followers past the age of 18 are less a school of philosophy than a cult.

But they’re by no means alone. The second proof that the bitch is wrong. There is no country, no community, no human grouping of any kind that has been modeled on Rand’s philosophy. Not even her own inner circle, which more closely resembled the Obama cult of personality than the airy-fairy utopia she was peddling. You see, politics always intrudes, perverts, and transforms even the noblest ideas to their opposites when all the authority is vested in what purports to be the logic of the “right people.”

Why every nation that has attempted to organize itself as a rational, atheist entity has always ended by slaughtering vast numbers of its people. Right and wrong are never successfully adjudicated by the smart people who insist they know right and wrong better than everyone else. They’re, in fact, the ones least to be trusted. Lenin and Mao, and Robespierre before them, probably did begin as idealists. But they became murderous monsters.

Sadly, we can see their like in today’s leftist egalitarians. A third proof of why the bitch is wrong. The Randians insist that we can trust the human mind, without God, to infer a higher morality implicit in human history and experience. Which is the exact same position taken by the largely atheist lefties who now insist that morality is the purpose of stultifying and destructive political correctness, which is succeeding brilliantly at closing down free speech and gradually transferring moral authority from individuals and families to the state.

The Randians faint response to this is that the lefties have got it all wrong, that a truly rational morality wouldn’t look anything like what the lefties are doing. But who’s to say? In the absence of God as a moral force above mere human beings, morality is in the mouth of the loudest speaker, the smartest lawyer, the most ambitious politician.

Why the genius of the founders established a rule of law that did NOT define itself as absolute justice, but as an aspiration to an impossible ideal of divine justice. Sever that aspiration and everything collapses into gutter fighting over trivia, with far from trivial consequences.

What is right and what is wrong are not political questions. They are cultural questions, meant to be debated away from the rough and tumble of town hall or the market square. And they don’t settle themselves by some magical means, as many rationalists like to assume, because frequently the right answers are hard answers, not ones that would ever be arrived at by the powerful or ambitious expedients. Why we have religions, theologies, and churches to help us remember the important answers so routinely undermined by daily life experience.

The peculiar myopia of the dumb-smart hyper-rationalists is that they observe — acute spectators of the human condition that they are — the existence of religions and religious adherents who answer the questions of right and wrong wrongly. This they would correct with their own right answers about right and wrong. Which requires the abolition of belief in God. But their vision is indeed myopia. The big questions are not settled by a genius at a typewriter or sitting on a throne. They are settled by history. The fourth proof that the bitch is wrong. Of course there are religions which come up with wrong answers. That doesn’t mean religion is evil. No more than crazy political parties mean that democracy is evil. Time is the teacher. But if you have no appreciation of time or tradition, you are almost certainly going to be one of those who learn right and wrong the hard way, er, the worst way, by becoming a victim of divine justice.

The bitch was wrong. Look at her. Seem happy, enlightened, and soaring on the wings of freedom to you? Thought not.