Brad DeLong reminds conservatives that John Galt’s views on religion probably don’t coincide with theirs:
What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge — he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil — he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor — he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire — he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy — all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man’s fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors they they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was — that robot, in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love — he was not man…
Galt, like Rand and all Objectivists, was an atheist, and Rand’s views on Christianity were decidedly hostile:
Playboy: Has no religion, in your estimation, ever offered anything of constructive value to human life?
Ayn Rand: Qua religion, no – in the sense of blind belief, belief unsupported by, or contrary to, the facts of reality and the conclusions of reason. Faith, as such, is extremely detrimental to human life: it is the negation of reason. But you must remember that religion is an early form of philosophy, that the first attempts to explain the universe, to give a coherent frame of reference to man’s life and a code of moral values, were made by religion, before men graduated or developed enough to have philosophy. And, as philosophies, some religions have very valuable moral points. They may have a good influence or proper principles to inculcate, but in a very contradictory context and, on a very – how should I say it? – dangerous or malevolent base: on the ground of faith. [Playboy interview with Ayn Rand]
It was Rand’s views on religion that motivated much of the irrational vitriol that pervaded Whittaker Chambers’ scathing review of Atlas Shrugged and i’s one reason that the National Review conservatives rejected her in the 1960s.
Now, I don’t have any problem at all with Rand’s views on religion. In fact, I largely agree with them.
The rest of you ? Well, if you’re going to adopt John Galt’s name and his strike, you probably ought to know what he was really all about.
