Gore Vidal on Ayn Rand

I made the mistake of reading Ayn Rand’s book The Fountainhead before her more celebrated work Atlas Shrugged that supposedly provides the clearest articulation of her philosophy of objectivism. After a promising start, The Fountainhead degenerated into a dreary polemic, with two-dimensional stereotypical characters behaving in utterly predictable ways, the whole thing written in melodramatic style. Although I completed it, it was such a bad novel that I simply could not bear the thought of reading another 1000 pages by the same writer and so never read Atlas Shrugged.

It is not that I am averse [Read more…]

Mohammed on the US Supreme Court?

There exists a marble frieze in the US Supreme Court building that overlooks the bench that contains carvings depicting 18 secular and religious lawgivers of the past. Guess who is included in the pantheon? Yes, it is the prophet Mohammed himself.

We know that Muslims are highly touchy about depictions of their prophet, some of them being willing to even kill those who do so. Hence it must have been quite awkward for all concerned to discover this. After the various controversies involving this issue, the Supreme Court included [Read more…]

The last word on traditional marriage

In the comments on my post yesterday about a senior Anglican cleric who defended ‘traditional marriage’ and said that it excluded same sex ones, people offered variants of what that phrase implied.

Since there seems to be some confusion on what constitutes ‘traditional marriage’, I thought that I would set everyone straight by reposting the definitive ruling on what constitutes Bible based marriage from the ultimate authority on this topic: Betty Bowers, America’s Best Christian™.

The limits of tradition

The second most senior cleric in the Church of England says that marriage must remain between a man and a woman and society should not attempt to change it because “I don’t think it is the role of the state to define what marriage is. It is set in tradition and history and you can’t just (change it) overnight, no matter how powerful you are.”

History and traditions can be powerful and even good things but if they are your only arguments against a practice then it is pretty clear that you have a very weak case.

Is there such a thing as an inoffensive atheist billboard?

As we all know, billboards with atheist messages seem to arouse indignant responses because of their purported offensiveness. Richard Wade wonders if it is the message itself or simply the fact that the word ‘atheist’ appears in the billboard sponsor’s name that drives believers up the wall.

To test his hypothesis, he suggests a number of billboards. Pretty funny.

(Thanks to reader Fu Dayi.)