“He must open his arms to protect all of God’s people and embrace with tender affection the whole of humanity, especially the poorest, the weakest, the least important, those whom Matthew lists in the final judgment on love: the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick and those in prison.” — Pope Francis
“The mystic parasites who have, throughout the ages, reviled the traders and held them in contempt, while honoring the beggars and the looters, have known the secret motive of their sneers: a trader is the entity they dread–a man of justice.” — Ayn Rand
All right, Paul Ryan. Enlighten me. How can you be a follower of both? I’m having genuine trouble figuring this out.
eurobrat 
03/19/2013 at 8:27 pm
New tact. Gonna sucker the poor. The educated are all atheists. Too Kirchner: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUYOxK2OkFE. 2 PARA!
03/20/2013 at 5:25 pm
Trust you to bring this back to the Falklands War 😉 Thanks D!
03/19/2013 at 9:07 pm
It sure would be nice if Paul Ryan whole-heartedly decided to embrace Ayn Rand.
03/20/2013 at 5:26 pm
Personally I would prefer that he embrace the Pope’s teachings more…but the point remains, you can’t have both at the same time. Man up and choose your side.
03/20/2013 at 4:40 am
Yep, we should elect the bones of Ayn Rand as President. Hot gravy, that one, all problems solved. Wrap Ryan in her skin, put a red, white and blue hat on his head and send him to the front of the line. He’s another opportunist looking to sway opinion by any means necessary (to steal a line from someone with actual historic conviction) in his quest for the White House. What kind of superhero athlete are you, Mr. Ryan? Wow!!
Aren’t you sick of that kind of thing by now? I’m a Democrat through and through, but Joe Biden’s yukking about looking for votes for 2016 is sickening. Serious change needs to happen to save the whole fucking planet. Ayn Rand’s human survivalist point of view isn’t a panacea, it’s just another form of glitter on a great giant cake of death that we’re all going to eat unless the larger problems of resources, nuclear weapons (and apparent MAJOR multiple wars on the horizon that could snuff out a large portion of all of humanity) and overpopulation are addressed. Paul Ryan, seriously, think bowl of corn chowder. With as many oyster crackers as his goons can force feed yer gullet.
03/20/2013 at 5:33 pm
I have a hard time doing that because I actually like chowder 🙂 Although I can’t say that I’ve ever had corn chowder before.
My issue with Ryan is that he’s trying to wear several skins at the same time, some of them contradictory. Not sure why I would be suprised at this, the audience listening to him is probably not very logical, so why would this be a problem? And Ayn Rand’s teachings are more than just glitter on the shitcake–I would say they help plunge us deeper into the cake of death, insofar as they prevent us from cooperating to solve our larger problems–since cooperating might involve giving up some of our personal profit, God forbid!
Yeah, I get cynical about all the politicking too–on both sides–but I will probably never get sick of politics watching. It’s my hobby 😉 I don’t like crochet or baking, so….
03/21/2013 at 1:45 pm
Yah, I’m not against Ayn Rand per se, read all her stuff except the mass of pamphlets she and her boy toy put out. My problem is with distilling her work into one or two overly simplistic points of view that often (always) distort the larger, more complex bit of work she put out – then saying ‘Ayn Rand supports our position!’ It’s like saying Jesus hates gays. God ain’t here. Rand ain’t here. Reagan ain’t here. We think in soundbites, have the attention span of a gnat and the folks that ‘lead’ us, like Rand, lie their fucking asses off with the ol’ Etch-a-Sketch mentality. They’re grotesque, insulting, venal, false and dangerous. I don’t know how anything is supposed to change so long as we accept the worst in our leaders as being normal.
03/25/2013 at 10:08 am
I have a HUGE problem with Ayn Rand. Her doctrine of selfishness and greed ratcheted up to the nth degree is all we need as a country or a world. That whole vision of the world divided up into takers and makers is Ayn Rand at her best. Randianism is a religion and it is the antithesis of the true Gospel of Christ which is built on the foundation of love, grace, mercy, selflessness, hope, and peace. (I realize that those that call themselves by Christ’s name have done a pretty pathetic job of conveying these principles, but that’s our problem not his.) Ryan’s problem is that he’s trying to serve two masters and you can’t: “you will either love one and hate the other or vice versa.” Because we are human, the self-centered “master” usually wins out. We need to get Ryan out of our House leadership and hope he never, ever becomes President.
03/25/2013 at 4:40 pm
Oh, he is definitely worshipping both God and Mammon. You can do one or the other of those, but not both…. And I’m with you on Ayn Rand. I’m living proof of the fact that you can survive Communist oppression without becoming an embittered believer in a heartless libertarian free market.
04/03/2013 at 12:02 pm
The older I get, the worse this Rand woman seems.
04/03/2013 at 4:27 pm
I think that the older we get, the more we realize that there are times when we have to lean on each other…and the harder it becomes to hold on to that immature philosophy of “I got mine and I’m not sharing”.
04/11/2013 at 9:15 am
“It is curious to observe how the theory of what is called the Christian church sprung out of the tail of the heathen mythology. A direct incorporation took place in the first instance, by making the reputed founder to be celestially begotten. The trinity of gods that then followed was no other than a reduction of the former plurality, which was about twenty or thirty thousand: the statue of Mary succeeded the statue of Diana of Ephesus; the deification of heroes changed into the canonization of saints; the Mythologists had gods for everything; the Christian Mythologists had saints for everything; the church became as crowded with one, as the Pantheon had been with the other, and Rome was the place of both. The Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient Mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue; and it yet remains to reason and philosophy to abolish the amphibious fraud.” (Thomas Paine, U. S. patriot, 1794)
04/11/2013 at 7:49 pm
Shhhh…don’t tell the Tea Party.
04/23/2013 at 11:07 am
Reblogged this on Whatever Works and commented:
Thanks brat . . . wouldn’t we all like to hear an answer to this one . . .
04/23/2013 at 2:57 pm
Thanks for reblogging, Moe! Yeah, I’d like to hear an answer too…and no doubt I will 😉
04/24/2013 at 7:39 am
Those two passages are in contradiction to each other so one can follow both without logical frisson, eurobrat.
04/24/2013 at 8:07 pm
Did you mean to say that they are not in contradiction to each other? If so, I disagree–no, I don’t believe it’s possible to follow both. One considers the poor to be a centerpiece of its theology. The other is disgusted at the idea of the poor being the centerpiece of a philosophy (“honoring the beggars”).
04/25/2013 at 5:29 am
Yes, I meant to say that they WEREN’T in contradiction to each other.
On can provide for the poor without holding the “traders” in contempt and/or robbing them of their wealth. One can also provide for the poor while not “honoring” them, even as one “embraces them with tender affection.”
04/25/2013 at 6:58 pm
But the Church *does* honor the poor. This might not be as true for the American Church, but in the rest of the world, the Church considers the poor to be where you find the presence of God and Christ, which is why good Catholics are supposed to focus their lives on serving them. At the very least, this is a philosophy in which the poor are more important than the traders. I still don’t see how Ayn Rand would approve of this.
10/17/2014 at 7:16 pm
ayn rand we the living
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