Leah Libresco at Unequally Yoked is running a “Religious Turing Test” with Christians and Atheists, each answering a slate of questions both stating what they believe and also impersonating the other, as kind of a fun exercise to see which side understands the other better. Responses will be voted on by people who don’t know the participants as being “response from a Christian/response from an Athiest.”
But in order to do that, we need questions! Feel free to submit questions in the comments and I’ll pass them along to Leah.
Alyssa Rosenberg, one of the sharpest cultural critics out there, has an excellent list of Women-Centered Culture for Guys, wherein she provides a list of things written by or starring women that are “not things you should watch or read out of obligation, but because they’re very good.”
And the list is, indeed, very good. And while I’ll let the Whedon fans out there mention the omission of Buffy and/or Dollhouse, for me, the most glaring omission on this list is Greg Rucka’s comics to novel series Queen and Country. Here’s a brief description from my Blogcritics review way back in 2004:
Enter Greg Rucka, and the brilliant comic book series Queen and Country. Now this is the kind of spy literature I can get into. Rucka doesn’t deal with uber-competent swashbucklers who chase down madmen bent on world domination. The spies of Queen and Country deal in much more real, dangerous, and morally ambiguous territory. Wet work. Infiltrating terrorist cells. Risking your life to find a roll of microfilm you know is somewhere around here. Dealing with budget cuts. Being helpless to stop an idiotic bureaucrat from jeopardizing a mission because he has the right political connections.
And the main character of the Queen and Country series is Tara Chace, who is hands down not just one of the best fictional female spies, but one of the best fictional spies, period. Since I wrote that review, Rucka’s written several more graphic volumes and novels. Check them all out.
“Of his 10 questions, 7 were quickly dismissable and were more than thoroughly addressed in my talk. They rest on a deep misconception that is shared with Jonathan Wells and many other pseudoscholarly creationists; I can summarize it with one standard template: ‘Since Darwinian evolution predicts that development will conserve the evolutionary history of an organism, how do you account for feature X which doesn’t fit that model?’ To which I can simply reply, ‘Evolution does not predict that development will conserve the evolutionary history of an organism, therefore your question is stupid.’”
– P.Z. Myers
I think this might be the Objectivist equivalent of the movie trailer I posted last week.
Setting aside the dubious wisdom of getting your romantic advice from a woman whose romantic life was, well, less than ideal, I’ve always felt the Objectivist view of love and sex to be rather problematic. In particular, I think that Rand’s view of ideal romance as a woman engaging in “hero worship” of her male lover to be profoundly mistaken. And her idea that the act of sex between them basically being one where the woman submits herself to “conquest” by a man to be abhorrent.
Love is a partnership. A partnership of equals. It’s not a “mutual trade.” It’s about setting aside your ego for one person to the point where “we” and “I” are, in many ways, the same thing. It’s about building a life together in a manner that’s not possible by yourself. No matter how you define it, selfishness and love are polar opposites.
This is not to say that when you love someone, you give up who you are completely. That’s nonsense. And to be fair, I think there’s no small amount of wisdom in Ayn Rand’s phrase, “To say ‘I love you,’ one must first know how to say the ‘I.’” You do have to have a good measure of virtue and independence before you can give yourself to someone else. The essence of love — moving beyond ego into a true partnership –is only possible from a position of personal strength. Otherwise, you might lose yourself completely to another person, instead of growing to make yourself a part of them — and Ayn Rand did get that right.
But what she missed is that it’s giving up part of your independence for another person and making yourself vulnerable that’s at the very essence of romantic love. Learning how to dismantle that “I” in order to say “we” is an important step in spiritual and romantic growth. You have to move beyond ego to develop the partnership that’s necessary to build a family.
But this is wholly alien to Rand’s conception of love as a “mutual trade” whereby a woman prostrates herself before a superior man.
Alex Knapp writes about pretty much everything under the sun, including politics, art, religion, philosophy, sports, music, culture, and science. He also actively writes about politics at the political blog Outside the Beltway and blogs about technology and futurism at Forbes. For the Social Media inclined, you can follow him on Facebook and Twitter.
Jubilee: Gruesome Twosome ~ May. 24. 2012. ~
Something about this strikes me as less than entirely Presidenti... Read More
~
The League of Ordinary Gentlemen: On the Eve of #LeagueFest 2012 ~ May. 24. 2012. ~ So the time has finally come. A dozen or so Gentlemen and spouses... Read More
Alex Knapp writes about pretty much everything under the sun, including politics, art, religion, philosophy, sports, music, culture, and science. He also actively writes about politics at the political blog