Ayn Rand on Religion:
PLAYBOY: Has no religion, in your estimation, ever offered anything of constructive value to human life?
RAND: Qua religion, noin 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 mans 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 veryhow should I say it?dangerous or malevolent base: on the ground of faith.
Christ, in terms of the Christian philosophy, is the human ideal. He personifies that which men should strive to emulate. Yet, according to the Christian mythology, he died on the cross not for his own sins but for the sins of the nonideal people. In other words, a man of perfect virtue was sacrificed for men who are vicious and who are expected or supposed to accept that sacrifice. If I were a Christian, nothing could make me more indignant than that: the notion of sacrificing the ideal to the nonideal, or virtue to vice. And it is in the name of that symbol that men are asked to sacrifice themselves for their inferiors. That is precisely how the symbolism is used.
What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call [mans] 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 knowledgehe acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evilhe became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his laborhe became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desirehe acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joyall the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of mans fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he wasthat robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love he was not man.
Mans fall, according to your teachers, was that he gained the virtues required to live. These virtues, by their standard, are his Sin. His evil, they charge, is that hes man. His guilt, they charge, is that he lives.
They call it a morality of mercy and a doctrine of love for man.
No, they say, they do not preach that man is evil, the evil is only that alien object: his body. No, they say, they do not wish to kill him, they only wish to make him lose his body. They seek to help him, they say, against his painand they point at the torture rack to which theyve tied him, the rack with two wheels that pull him in opposite directions, the rack of the doctrine that splits his soul and body.
The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond mans power to conceivea definition that invalidates mans consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence . . . Mans mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God . . . Mans standard of value, say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of God, whose standards are beyond mans power of comprehension and must be accepted on faith . . . The purpose of mans life . . . is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.
Unable to resolve a lethal contradiction, the conflict between individualism and altruism, the West is giving up. When men give up reason and freedom, the vacuum is filled by faith and force.