Raymond Ibrahim, a Shillman Fellow at the Freedom Center and author of Defenders of the West, makes a few appearances in the following video from Church Militant to discuss the convergence of masculinity and faith.
Don’t miss it below:
Raymond Ibrahim
Raymond Ibrahim is the author of 'Defenders of the West,' 'Sword and Scimitar,' and several other books.
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The Muslims have large families and their men are willing to kill and die for the faith. Does that mean the Muslim family will save the West?
The only thing that can save the rational West, a West of freedom, liberty, and capitalism is freedom, liberty, and capitalism. And the only thing that can save and defend those rational values is a consistent, non-contradictory, philosophy of reason. That philosophy is Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism.
“The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.” – Abraham Lincoln
“Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.” – Aristotle
“The present state of the world is not the proof of philosophy’s impotence, but the proof of philosophy’s power. It is philosophy that has brought men to this state—it is only philosophy that can lead them out.” – Ayn Rand
“Ayn Rand is to Aristotle what Kant is to Plato. Both sides of the perennial duel, in their pure form, have finally been made explicit. Kan’ts philosophy is Platonism without paganism.
Ayn Rand’s philosophy is Aristotelianism without Platonism. At this point in history, the West is mutating again. The reason is that Kant as a cultural power is dead.
Kant is dead in academic philosophy; the subject has effectively expired under his tutelage. He is dead among the intellectuals, whose world view is disillusionment (they call it “the end of ideology”). He is dead in the realm of art, where nihilism, with little left to defy, is turning into its inevitable product: nihil (this is now being called “minimalism” and “postmodernism”).
Kant is dead even in Berlin and Moscow. As of this writing, although it is too early to know, communism seems to be disintegrating.
The collapse of a negative, however, is not a positive. The atrophy of a vicious version of unreason is not the adoption of reason. If men fail to discover living ideas, they will keep moving by the guidance of dead ones; they will keep following, by inertia, the principles they have already institutionalized. For the nations of the East and West alike today, no matter what they’re faddish lipservice to a “free market”, the culmination of these principles is some variant of dictatorship, new or revised — if not communist, then fascist and/or religious and/or tribal. Force and faith on such a scale would mean the fate of the ancients [the Dark Ages] once again.
The only man who can stave off another Dark Ages is the Father of the Enlightenment [and the Renaissance — Aristotle].
It is true that Aristotle has flaws, which always gave his enemies an opening. But now the opening has been closed [by Ayn Rand].
The solution to the crisis of our age is love, as everyone says. But the love we need is not love of God or the neighbor. It is the love of the good for being the good. The good, in this context, includes reality, man the hero, and man’s tool of survival [reason].
Some remnant of such love still survives in the West. Above all, it survives in the people of America — which despite its decline, is still the leader and beacon of the world. A nation, however, is shaped ultimately not by its people, but by its intellectuals. This is the grounds for fear, unless some “new intellectuals”, as Ayn Rand called them can be created….
Objectivism is preeminently an American viewpoint, even though most people, here and abroad, know nothing about it. It is American because it identifies the implicit base of the United States, as the country was originally conceived.
Ayn Rand’s ideas would resolve the contradiction that has been tearing apart the land of the free, the contradiction between its ethics and its politics. The result would be not America as it is or even as it once was, but the grandeur of a Romantic pinnacle: America “as it might be and ought to be”.
If one judges only by historical precedent, this kind of projection is the merest fantasy; we are arguably past the point of no return. America, however, is a country without precedent, and man has the faculty of volition. To the end of her life, Ayn Rand upheld her “benevolent-universe” premise. The good, she maintained, can be achieved; “it is real, it is possible, it’s yours”. So long as there is no censorship, she taught, there is a chance for persuasion to succeed.
If no definite prediction can be made, she taught, then in reason only one action is proper: to go on fighting for reason.” – Objectivist philosopher Leonard Peikoff, from his book “Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand”
You obviously do not have a normal family. No wonder you spend your days posting irrelevant novels.
There is no “saving” anything. The destruction of life as we know it on earth is well under way. Read the last half of the Book of Revelation… THAT is the future.
Already read it. If I can help it I ain’t a-goin’ down with the ship.