| | Why is that when someone discusses an unpopular view, it invariably leads to exile? Objectivist sites are so tiresome in that regard. Rich was a nice guy who contributed some good stuff. He has been around here long enough that he should have been given the benefit of the doubt not tarred and feathered.
Of course all ideas are not equal, everyone here knows that, but neither is ability which many forget. Ideas are either right or wrong and can be debated. Dismissing someone because certain ideas are 'offensive' is subjectivism of the worst sort. There is no right to not be offended, that is absurd on its face. To take offense is a personal decision, one chooses to be offended . . . or not.
Rich didn't suggest specific forms of activism. He suggested a complete surrender to irrationality by claiming we shouldn't bring up the fact that religion and faith are not based on reason. I personally did not find Rich irrational or willing to surrender to the irrational, and so what if he did. If an accurate representation of Objectivism is a requirement for posting here 90% of the membership should be run off, and the remaining 10% would still be louts by ARI's standards.
Religion and God
Rand did not excoriate God, she attacked religion. Much of what Rich was trying to say, is better explained by Rand in her introduction to the Fountainhead, i.e. "the difficulty with discussions of the spiritual is the undefined prejudicial concepts involved." She tell us, "[repeating for emphasis]…I said that religious abstractions are the product of man’s mind, not of supernatural revelation". Rand's quote reminds us that it is incorrect to dismiss religious abstractions as purely mystical or as a hallucinations of the mind. She chose to focus on faith v. reason and to attack the concept of altruism, brilliantly recognizing that it was the root cause of collectivism. She attacks religion, not some retired clockmaker. She like the Deists of the Enlightenment simply ignores ‘him’ as irrelevant. She has nothing but praise for the Deists of the Enlightenment and for those who founded this nation
But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
-Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782.
Leonard Peikoff in commenting on America’s founding notes, "The leaders of the American Enlightenment did not reject the idea of the supernatural completely; characteristically, they were deists, who believed that God exists as nature's remote, impersonal creator, and as the original source of natural law; but, they held, having performed these functions, God thereafter retires into the role of a passive, disinterested spectator ..." In terms of activism, i.e. connecting with the over 90% of the people in this country and this world who are religious, take notice that Deism is not too far removed from the Objectivist’s belief in reality as the final arbiter, the personification of ‘nature’ and in a benevolent universe.
Ethics
When Nietzsche wrote "God is dead", "God" represented the shared culture which had once been the defining and uniting characteristic of European civilization. Nietzsche was concerned that the acceptance of the God’s death would mean the end of accepted standards of morality and of purpose; that without accepted faith based standards, society would be threatened by nihilism. A cursory glance at today’s Europe shows us how prescient that was. Young minds are filled with the ‘wisdom’ of Jacques Derrida and Umberto Eco who tell us that firmly held convictions and clear visions of the truth are ‘worthless hallucinations of the mind’, and that ‘truth and fact are judgmental’. Eco perfects his villainy with "The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen [should be viewed] as the beginning of modern depravity."
The founders, too, feared that banishing religion from the public square would result in an absence of ethics or in SOLO’s vernacular ‘pomo wanking’. George Washington noted, "Let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religions." Washington was implying what Rand observes when she notes in her journal,
"Men’s intellectual capacities have always been so unequal, that to the thinkers, the majority of their brothers have probably always seemed sub-human. And some men may still be, for all the evidence of their rationality, or lack of it." Objectivists rightly argue that Ethics do not depend upon a belief in God, but the few who truly understand the philosophy of Ayn Rand are highly intelligent and not the average man on the street. The ordinary man is not capable of studying Epistemology in order to come to an understanding of what Ethics are proper for man. To the average man, religion and ethics are synonymous; freedom from God equates to freedom from morality, and they act accordingly. Those who are militantly godless, as opposed to those who treat God as irrelevant, suffer from unintended consequence. Their approach results in a vacuum invariably filled by post modernism, i.e., a society without values.
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What's invalid is invalid. It's generally not a point of discussion except for those who insist on claiming that they have unprovable beliefs. Reality invalidates the arbitrary and the non-existant. ... not me. 
