It is my favorite book.

and it’s my opinion, that if you don’t understand the philisophical view that rand is espousing by the time you get to the monologue, then you certainly won’t understand it here.

the question of which philosophy to follow really begs the question.

for many of the big questions there will be no final answers this side of the grave and possbily not even there

and so

we are left with
some of this
and some of that
imperfect philosophies for an imperfect world

the big contribution of atlas shrugged
and, in my opinion,
the biggest demon in american society today

is the issue of personal accountability

how many of the problems that we face as a nation and as a family and as an individual
could we solve if we simply

took responsibility for our own actions
good and bad

as easily as we assign them to others?

The answer is yes, but only because what actions we should take tells us who we are. Whether or not I have intrinsic rights tells me something about how I got here. What I should do now tells me the purpose of my existence. In short, it is the small questions – which can be answered in ignorance of the big picture – that tell us what the answers to the big questions are.

Atlas Shrugged really upset me because of the methodical way in which the “overachievers” were overwhelmed by the morons around them.

Regardless of our certainty we bring persuppositions into these other meaningful questions. For example, if we are here as a result of nothing plus time and chance, this shapes how we view morality, ethics, and all other branches of philosophy. If we believed there is no truth, this too would totaly shape these questions. If there is objective truth, objective morality and ethics, I would argue that there must be an objective truth giver to establish these things. There must be a higher power than man.

Thanks for the compliment. Yes, I did design it largely by myself. The header is from a photo I found on Flickr (of some sort of fungus no less). What remains is the CSS which is mostly my own work – with some inspirations from various other designers.

As for the ‘big’ questions – are those questions we can ever know the answers to with any degree of certainty? To believe an answer to those questions means we have to ignore at leat part of several contrary arguments.

I know this is a big question but if you believe ‘facts are facts’ or objective absolutes there has to be some philosophy that is right. I think the challenge is we narrow into the reality too quickly. We take reality as a series of assumptions. What I mean is prior to discussing philosophy governing living, it would be valuable to understand some of the ‘big’ questions. Who are we? How did we get here? Is there some purpose to our existence? These questions determine the other questions and how we approach them.