Theistic Objectivism?

[daenku32]

I've ran into a guy who has unintentionally got me really exposed to Ayn Rand and objectivism. Mainly by being a "hard-core" libertarian.

However, at lot of his Individualism to property rights etc are rooted in God-given rights; sounding very theistic to me. While pure objectivism should be independent (if not exclusive) of theism due the difficulty of objectively proving it, I'm having hard time discussing public policy on him on things like taxation.
Of course, I don't want to get into that in this thread...

My question therefore is: Could theistic objectivism be a description of him and his politics or is there a better description? Google search only returned 4 hits for "theistic objectivism" (which I think might be a new record based on the word combination searches with small hit counts.."theistic" got 1,960,000 and "objectivism" 2,210,000)

 

[webfusion]

Ouch, this thread topic makes my head hurt.

 

[BPSCG]

Well, I dug up a dictionary definition of "objectivism" and came up with "[o]ne of several doctrines holding that all reality is objective and external to the mind and that knowledge is reliably based on observed objects and events."

Since theism is something that exists in the absence of observed objects and events, I would say that whatever your friend's philosophy may be called, it has internal contradictions in it.

In any case, to call it theistic objectivism (or objective theism) would be paradoxical. And you know what Rand had to say about paradoxes.

 

[daenku32]

And you know what Rand had to say about paradoxes.

Ok, so I don't know that much about Rand. But I'll google it..promise.

 

[BPSCG]

Ok, so I don't know that much about Rand. But I'll google it..promise.

I'll save you the trouble (you said he'd gotten you "really exposed," so I assumed...); she wrote somewhere in Atlas Shrugged that there are no paradoxes. If you think you have discovered a paradox, examine your premises, because one of them is wrong.

 

[webfusion]

Of course there is such a thing as a paradox.

"Pair of ducks"