Rand’s heroine of Atlas Shrugged wasn’t a pro-choice, weed smoking alternative rock atheist. She was a railroad executive. Name of Dagny Taggart.

Things her acolytes don’t actually get about her. She was a philosopher. Her fictional creations were people who knew what work was. The hero of Atlas Shrugged was Dagny Taggart, who didn’t care about objectivist philosophy as much as keeping a troubled railroad running. Her first two lovers were the same. Hank Reardon invented a new metal alloy, which the government took from him and called Miracle Metal and Francisco the ore baron who spoke for ten pages about the meaning of the US dollar. Cool. Rand also creamed her jeans over an an architect named Howard Roarke in The Fountainhead. Clearly she loved the doers more than the ideologues and was seeking to preserve and promote their freedom to create.

The acolytes love the philosophy part and never seem to get the hard hard work part. They want to do what they want to do, whenever they want to do it, because they are Ayn’s heirs.

You see, the kindest interpretation of Rand’s atheism is that she just put the whole question of God aside, regarding it as corrupted by collectivist doctrines like Soviet Communism. Fair enough. That was her entire cultural and historical experience as a person born into Stalinist Russia.

As an escapee from that soul destroying system and its educational propaganda, she concentrated on the freeing properties of capitalism, people interacting for personal gain, as an antidote to the death represented by totalitarian government.

None of this makes her a theologian. She was a victim of a vicious system. It certainly doesn’t make her an articulate spokesman for atheism. Raised in a rigid system, she became rigid. Raised in a totalitarian culture, she became ruthless and vicious in her personal dealings. The biographies confirm this.

She could brook no criticism. We all have the weaknesses of our strengths and the strengths of our weaknesses. We can learn from her without being acolyte slaves.

Hence my defense. What she believed in above everything else was the virtue of work and dedication and what rewards it should bring you. John Galt was just a fairy tale that stood her in place of a God she’d been disabled from believing in.

How many of her followers are accomplished at running railroads, innovating in technology, and excelling in acts of creative commercial art? Thinking mostly none. But we can light up a cigarette in her honor.

God bless the child. She was lost but she is found.

What do you think?