"Focus..................................."

About three fourths of the way into “Atlas Shrugged”, the hero usurps this country’s national airwaves, blocking an advertized speech by some politician on the State of the Union, and what the people hear instead is this fellow’s declaration of “truth”. Four pages into the message that he brings, I’m beginning to wonder if this guy isn’t just a broken record. Investigation reveals to me that, in fact, he’s only delivered thus far but one tenth of what appears to be the author’s personal credo, something she calls “Objectivism”, something, simply stated, no more than an atheist’s view of “I am; therefore I think”. After calling the Biblical tenet of “original sin” a “monstrous absurdity”, Ms. Rand then states: “Reality is that which exists, truth the recognition of reality, and reason, man’s only means of knowledge, the only standard of truth.” She speaks of a rational process as being a moral process, of a man’s judgment as serving for an authority for what’s “right” and what’s “wrong”…I skipped the “novel-within-a-novel”, having already determined the worth of digesting any more of what’s her call for humanity to utilize its brain in any and all evaluation of our identity. That portion of her theology is not wasted on me in so much as I find the lack thereof to account for much of what’s wrong with the Church: not that we who believe are mindless idiots, but that too often we settle for another fellow’s definitions, too lazy to “work out our own salvation”. The author makes some good points, in my opinion; she just errs in both omitting God as the genesis of her existence and refusing His rod and staff as some discipline in her journey…..