holidays — VOICES for REASON

We at Voices for Reason would like to wish all you a very happy New Year. And what better way to start the New Year than by reading Alex Epstein’s op-ed, “The Meaning of New Year’s Resolutions”?

This New Year’s, resolve to think about how to make your life better, not just once a year, but every day. Resolve to set goals, not just in one or two aspects of life, but in every important aspect and in your life as a whole. Resolve to pursue the goals that will make you successful and happy, not as the exception in a life of passivity, but as the rule that becomes second-nature.

Whole thing here.

Image: Flickr

That’s the intriguing start to an essay by Onkar Ghate, senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute (and Voices for Reason blogger), in the latest issue of U.S. News & World Report. The magazine invited him to address the “con” side of this debate: “Have the Holidays Become Too Secular?”

His answer, in essence, is that the true meaning of Christmas is secular, not religious. “Christmas in America is not a Christian holiday,” Dr. Ghate writes, explaining the paradox this way:

Christmas’s relation to goodwill leads many to believe the holiday inseparable from Christianity, allegedly the religion of goodwill. But the connection is tenuous. A doctrine that tells you that you’re a sinner—that you must seek redemption but cannot earn it yourself—and that Jesus, sinless, has endured an excruciating death to redeem you, who doesn’t deserve his sacrifice but who should accept it anyway—can hardly be characterized as expressing a benevolent view of man.

Read the rest of this entry »

In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, there’s an unforgettable Thanksgiving scene at the mansion of Hank Rearden, a self-made millionaire industrialist whose achievements include the invention—after ten years of toil—of a revolutionary new metal, stronger, cheaper and more durable than steel. In addition to Rearden, seated at the table for Thanksgiving dinner are his mother, his wife Lillian, and his brother Philip, all of whom are wholly dependent on Rearden and his wealth.

Here’s is Rand’s description of the setting:

The roast turkey had cost $30. The champagne had cost $25. The lace tablecloth, a cobweb of grapes and vine leaves iridescent in the candlelight, had cost $2,000. The dinner service, with an artist’s design burned in blue and gold into a translucent white china, had cost $2,500. The silverware, which bore the initials LR in Empire wreaths of laurels, had cost $3,000. But it was held to be unspiritual to think of money and of what that money represented.

A peasant’s wooden shoe, gilded, stood in the center of the table, filled with marigolds, grapes and carrots. The candles were stuck into pumpkins that were cut as open-mouthed faces drooling raisins, nuts and candy upon the tablecloth.

In keeping with Thanksgiving tradition, Rearden’s family gives thanks for the bounty before them.

Read the rest of this entry »