Catholic and Enjoying It!
That goes, by the way, for Ron Paul who seems to me to be a good man captivated with a bad philosophy. I suspect his goodness, like that of so many Tea Partiers, is what has shielded him from the toxic effects of Rand’s more poisonous ideas.
One of the saving graces of the human race is that we are deeply inconsistent. I learned this long ago when it came to the rhetoric of Evangelicals vs. Catholic teaching. Huge numbers of Evangelicals *say* they believe in “the Bible alone” but really believe in Sacred Tradition and don’t realize they do. They talk about salvation by faith alone and then live as thought they believe their bumper sticker when it says, “Please be patient. God is not finished with me yet” (a deeply Catholic sentiment).
Bottom line: when you are dealing with anybody who is not a professional theologian or philosopher who is paid to formulate their words with extreme precision, watch what they do more than what they say. Somebody like Paul talks about his admiration for Rand, but he doesn’t live in a way explicable by Rand’s philosophy. Offering free medical services to the poor? Rand would be disgusted. Paul is too much of Christian gentleman to be the jerk Rand wants us to be. There isn’t *just* hypocrisy in the world. There is also eupocrisy. When it comes to Objectivism, Paul is often a eupocrite.
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