JZ ROSE carries books by AYN RAND- Why? Listen:

[Vanilla]

WHY WOULD JZ ROSE CARRY THESE?? HMM


Ayn Rand said this about SPIRITUALISM and MYSTICS:

The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.

Faith is the worst curse of mankind, as the exact antithesis and enemy of thought.

The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short circuit destroying the mind.

Thinking men cannot be ruled.

[T]he only real moral crime that one man can commit against another is the attempt to create, by his words or actions, an impression of the contradictory, the impossible, the irrational, and thus shake the concept of rationality in his victim.

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.

Are you in a universe which is ruled by natural laws and, therefore, is stable, firm, absolute - and knowable? Or are you in an incomprehensible chaos, a realm of inexplicable miracles, an unpredictable, unknowable flux, which your mind is impotent to grasp? The nature of your actions - and of your ambition - will be different, according to which set of answers you come to accept.

The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God-- a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive- a definition that invalidates man's consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence...Man's mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God... Man's standard of value, say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of God, whose standards are beyond man's power of comprehension and must be accepted on faith....The purpose of man's life...is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.

For centuries, the mystics of spirit had existed by running a protection racket - by making life on earth unbearable, then charging you for consolation and relief, by forbidding all the virtues that make existence possible, then riding on the shoulders of your guilt, by declaring production and joy to be sins, then collecting blackmail from the sinners.

if devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.... the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind.

"to rest one's case on faith means to concede that reason is on the side of one's enemies- that one has no rational arguments to offer."

Rand rejected all forms of faith or mysticism, terms that she used synonymously. She defined faith as "the acceptance of allegations without evidence or proof, either apart from or against the evidence of one's senses and reason... Mysticism is the claim to some non-sensory, non-rational, non-definable, non-identifiable means of knowledge, such as 'instinct,' 'intuition,' 'revelation,' or any form of 'just knowing.'"[26] Reliance on revelation is like reliance on a Ouija board; it bypasses the need to show how it connects its results to reality. Faith, for Rand, is not a "short-cut" to knowledge, but a "short-circuit" destroying

[Ockham]

Good call Vanilla. Maybe the Rand books are old stock from when JZ Rose was the Outback Botique?

The following quote of Ayn Rand may be found on the Ayn Rand Institue web site. It appears to be Rand's remarks following a book seller's conference in 1962. The qouted material may be copyright and presented here for instructional purposes only:

My philosophy, Objectivism, holds that:

1. Reality exists as an objective absolute—facts are facts, independent of man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.

2. Reason (the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses) is man’s only means of perceiving reality, his only source of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival.

3. Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life. ...

Ref: http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer? ... vism_intro

No. 1: sure would be a problem for Ramtha philosophy! No "create your day" here; a Platonist view of reality.

No. 2: maybe OK? It seems to square with the notion of ultimate observer, but Ramtha as a source of gnostic truth would be out; irrelevant.

No. 3: that sounds like good stuff for ramster think. Go build that UG; self-interest is good; don't worry about fellow humans; let them worry about themselves!

That's not necessarily what I think personally, especially No. 3. A world without compassion is pretty cold.