A man takes the day off work and decides to go out golfing. He is on the second hole when he notices a frog sitting next to the green. He thinks nothing of it and is about to shoot when he hears, Rib bit 9 Iron."

The man looks around and doesn't see anyone. Again, he hears, "Rib bit 9 Iron." He looks at the frog and decides to prove the frog wrong, puts the club away, and grabs a 9 iron.

Boom! He hits it 10 inches from the cup. He is shocked. He says to the frog, "Wow that's amazing. You must be a lucky frog, eh?

The frog replies, "Rib bit Lucky frog." The man decides to take the frog with him to the next hole.

"What do you think frog?" the man asks. "Rib bit 3 wood."

The guy takes out a 3 wood...

Call me an old romantic, but I see a spark there!

You said, regarding Rand, ”I find that she pooh poohs the church more than the idea of faith."

I’ve read a fair bit of her non-fiction, and I can't recall a single instance where she ever attacked "the church".

She DID vigorously attack the concept of faith, which she considered the antithesis of reason. As I quoted earlier, she considered it “mind-destroying” and “the worst curse of mankind”.

And while Thomas Paine DID tend to assault the church directly – even he had to admit that it almost wasn’t worth the effort. To paraphrase him, “Why hack away at the branches of a tree (the church, dogma) when you can chop it off at the root (faith, belief)?”

Anyway, Ayn Rand considered faith to be dangerous,...

I let myself get a bit carried away there, huh?

The original article listed Ayn Rand right up there with the Bible on the "required reading" chart, and the comments made here started to take on a somewhat "spiritual" tone. (And I probably started the ball rolling too.)

It's just that I so often hear devout believers quoting Rand and Paine, but they are often completely unaware of some of the disconcerting facts surrounding these two prominent figures.

It was stupid of me to generalize and make assumptions with regards to your, or anyone else's faith.

My apologies.

sorry for careless grammatical errors...

“it's” instead of “its”

"Paine considered Christianity" instead of "Paine claimed Christianity"

and, uggh, I wrote "commen" instead of "common"

Forgive a tried, ack, TIRED old man.

Are you sure you want to quote him?

I mentioned earlier that it was puzzling why Christians are so readily embracing Ayn Rand, a very “anti-God” philosopher, but their affectation for Thomas Paine is even more curious.

Ayn Rand opposed religion and faith in the abstract. Thomas Paine attacked Christianity directly, and with much blasphemous hostility.

A Christian quoting Paine on the subject of politics (because he had some good ideas about government) is akin to a Jew quoting Hitler on the subject of oven-repair.

Paine considered Christianity was more tyrannical than any government could EVER be.

Some Paine quotes:

“It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine and murder; for...

I thought your comments were most admirable and open-minded. Kudos.

If I may - I have to take exception to one of your them. You said (speaking of Rand): "Nor is any of the human behavior she promotes with her Objectivist philosophy overtly 'sinful' in any way that I can see."

I believe that Objectivism, at it's very core, represents the very height of sinfulness. The word itself – Objectivism - carries with it, by definition, an outright denial of the concept of faith, which she deemed to be “detrimental to human life”, “destroying the mind”, making a man an “abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.”

Secondly – She considered “pride”, arguably the greatest of all...

Rand's book was horribly written.

Atlas may have shrugged but so did I, with every page I turned.

Fiction writing was not one of Rand's strengths.

I'm not sure what you’re trying to imply with the Thomas Paine quote regarding William the Conqueror.

Are you calling Paine a hypocrite?

Your intention is unclear, to me anyway.

You equate the Bible and “Atlas Shrugged” as required reading?

Have you read either?

Ayn Rand was a staunch atheist – she considered the concept of the Judeo-Christian god to be utterly absurd.

She was, what you might label, an intellectual – a genuine one at that.

Some quotes from Rand:

“Faith is the worse curse of mankind, as the exact antithesis and enemy of thought.”

“The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short circuit destroying the mind.”

“(The Doctrine of Original Sin) declares that (man) ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge - he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil - he became a moral being/ He was...