I do not think that religion has anything to do with God. I do not think that any organized religion exists for any purpose other than to control the ignorant masses. After repeating big lies for so long, even the people who should be the leaders have come to believe and are damning us all.

This goes back to Whittaker Chambers' slanderous pan of the novel.

Now perhaps we can debate why Rand was an atheist. I say it's because she accepted the statists' wrongful co-optation of the Christian message as the real thing, and rejected both.

Good grief... the article speaks for itself in its tired old saw complaints. It is as if there was nothing more in the philosophy to offer than atheism... News Flash! Atheism and Objectivism are two different words for a reason...

"One can imagine the collective shriek of indignation that would come from right-wing pundits like Hannity if a left-wing politician and pundits summarily elected to appear in a film with a dubious moral message."

They really don't get it. I wonder if deep down the author herself even believes it. Being left-wing and right-wing are morally dubious IMHO. Most of AS isn't a moral or political message. It says we can observe the world and use observations to create models to build things to help other people. It says interjecting ourselves w/o permission into private arrangements of people helping one another in trade can have disastrous unintended consequences. These are facts.

Religious beliefs and beliefs that I love my family are not scientifically falsifiable and therefore aren't part of this. If religion tries to manipulate us into sharing our lives and what we build with others or into accepting falsifiable claims on faith, AS is anti-religion. But not all religion does that.

At least the author does wrongly thing that AS is for mindless picking bundle of conclusions on issues such as taxes and imaginary friends. She wants you to pick their bundle or someone else's b/c that what she gets paid to write, but AS says to think and live for yourself.

Yes.

Organized religion is the problem.

Seems to me that many religious people want no part of organized religion. So much so that they claim their belief in God is not even religious, but a personal belief, following his rules
(if you see a contradiction, so do I)

Indeed, it doesn't, and often they do walk parallel paths.

The article is an opinion piece - it's supposed to be one sided - her side. It doesn't look any different than her usual stuff. Check out her other work to see what I mean:
http://theweek.com/author/elizabeth-stok...

I find nothing terribly peculiar in what she's written. It amounts to the same thing as the "Jesus or Rand - pick one" poster that was floating around during the second movie release. Everyone was making exactly the same criticism then.

And - I see the same thing going on the other direction. Some people here just can't abide the God topic and if you discuss it they figure you must have landed in the gulch by accident and hope you grow up and learn to think some day.
Christian Egoist wrote on this a while back as well...
https://thechristianegoist.wordpress.com...

Which does not mean they can't walk parallel paths most of the time

Wow, that's laughable. The person writing it is probably pretty "anti-Christian" themselves, ironically. The left will stop at nothing for their cause - like Hitler. They are without shame.

The article is one-sided from a Christian perspective, but makes some interesting points. Christianity and Objectivism, while not completely different on many particular topics, are foundationally different on how they arrive at their viewpoints.