Bill O'Reilly wins award for stupidity

The word stolen is badly chosen I think.

Religions, evolve in a culture etc.
They always find their base in the ideas and conviction from that what went before them.

That is not stealing; that is how history, including religion, evolves

In The Netherlands we don't use that symbol.
We use this (you will find this specific one on a doctor's car):



It is the rod of Aesculapius, is an ancient symbol associated with astrology, the Greek god Asclepius, and with medicine and healing.
It consists of a serpent entwined around a staff.
The name of the symbol derives from its early and widespread association with Asclepius, the son of Apollo, who was a practitioner of medicine in ancient Greek mythology.
His attributes, the snake and the staff, sometimes depicted separately in antiquity, are combined in this symbol. Hippocrates himself was a worshipper of Asclepius.

What the U.S. uses is the Caduceus as a symbol of medicine.
The caduceus is sometimes mistakenly used as a symbol of medicine and/or medical practice, especially in North America, because of widespread confusion with the traditional medical symbol, the rod of Asclepius, which has only a single
snake and no wings.

This usage is erroneous, popularised largely as a result of the adoption of the caduceus as its insignia by the US Army medical corps in 1902 at the insistence of a single officer (though there are conflicting claims as to whether this was Capt. Frederick P. Reynolds or Col. John R. van Hoff).
snake and no wings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

If you are interested in religion and its history you will take in account, the roots from wich it came and how it has interwoven itself into Judeism and Christianity (to stay with your example)
I don't see a problem with that.
The same for the different holy books of any religion;always take in account the time it was written in.

I don't know how this is in the U.S., but this is something I knew for a long time; some things you mentioned were thought in school

The difference between the U.S. an here is that the U.S. generally make such an issue of religion, or being an atheist for that matter.
it is made VERY public (interwoven in public and political live).
Here religion is more something that is private.

I find people those people like Bill O'Reilly and all those other fundamentalistic, born again, country under God people rather scary!
They have lost sight of that wat is state and that was is church.
The have lost sight on compassion with your fellowman is about.

You know, unlike most of Rand's disciples, I actually HAVE read all one-thousand-and-some-odd pages of "Atlas Shrugged", and I have a few questions:

1) How come none of her "self-made" heroes are actually self-made? All of them are wealthy heirs and heiresses. The closest thing I could find to a truly self-made industrialist in her book was Dagny's great-grandpappy Nat Taggart, a man of such great moral character that when a man offered him a government business loan, he threw that man down a flight of stairs, and instead pimped his wife to a millionaire for the startup capital he needed.

2) How come none of her "self-made" heroes had to work their way through college, or work two jobs while trying to launch their businesses? In the real world, that's how TRULY self-made people are made.

3) Why is it that if a poor person takes an unearned dime from a rich person, that poor person is "evil" in Rand's words, but when a wealthy woman steals an airplane with the help of a security guard who is SUPPOSED to be PROTECTING the plane, and then subsequently crashes it in the mountains, without ever attempting to contact the plane's owners to deliver so much as a thank-you note, much less compensation for their valuable property, Rand doesn't seem to think that it's morally wrong in any way?

4) How did Rand expect her protagonists to survive in the mountains for more than a single generation, given that the population of her industrialist Utopia was almost entirely male? (Many of them were men who'd left their "parasitic" wives and children behind, while many more were unmarried.) Was Ayn Rand as clueless about the facts of biology as she was about morality and economics?

5) If a society that practices wealth redistribution is doomed to failure as Rand suggests, why is it necessary for her protagonists to engage in acts of piracy and sabotage in order to bring about the collapse of society? Shouldn't depriving society of their talents have been enough, in and of itself, to destroy society, without her moral paragons being forced to taint their superior morals by engaging in thievery and property crime? Was Ayn Rand incapable -- even in a FICTIONAL context -- of conceiving a world which was truly kept from its own self-destruction by the upper 1%?

6) Which of Rand's industrialist supermen did she expect to aspire to such industry as garbage collection, ditch-digging, sewage processing, and other unskilled and/or manual labor? You know, the things that really *would* cause the collapse of society if the people who did them suddenly disappeared?

7) Back to the plane that Dagny Taggart stole. How omnicompetent is our heroine, to have the ability, without any prior training or experience, to pilot a glorified beer can with wings over the highest and most treacherous peaks of the Rocky Mountains, land safely, take off and come back over the same route, before finally crashing in the mountains? And when she finally *does* crash, it's not due to pilot incompetence, but thanks to the ubercompetence of her peers, who have devised an ingenious cloaking device to prevent their little Utopian enclave from being detected from the air. (Dagny's second solo flight ends abruptly when she inadvertently flies into an optical illusion caused by this cloaking device and becomes disoriented.) I'm duly impressed -- Flying over the Rocky Mountains twice without any cockpit experience without getting killed is quite the feat!

These are not mere plot holes, because this is no ordinary work of fiction. Rand's objectivist disciples revere this book much the way that Christians revere the Bible. In fact, it's the only book I've ever read that's actually *preachier* than the Bible (not to mention longer.) Much like the Bible, it is a work of fiction that many people look to for moral authority, and base their own moral philosophy upon. And yet, much like the Bible, its own heroes are villainous by its own moral code.

Historically, it is dangerous for large groups of people to adopt a morally-inconsistent work of fiction as their moral guide. When that work of fiction is the Bible, people get burned at stake. When that work of fiction is "An Inconvenient Truth", people start torching SUVs in car dealers' lots (because of course the carbon footprint of pouring gasoline over a vehicle and burning it is canceled out by the fact that no gasoline will ever be burned in its engine.)

When that work of fiction is "Atlas Shrugged", what we get is, well....

In her lifetime, Ayn Rand collected a cult following among men who would one day themselves become the movers and shakers of our modern world, including conservative pundits like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Neil Boortz, Republican congressmen Paul Ryan and John Campbell, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, to whom Rand was a close personal friend and mentor.

So moved was Greenspan by Rand's objectivist philosophy that when the New York Times Book Review published a review by Granville Hicks which said that Atlas Shrugged was "written out of hate", Greenspan wrote a letter to NYTBR defending Rand's novel, saying, "...Atlas Shrugged is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should."

Throughout his 18-year career as the Fed chairman, Greenspan remained doggedly devoted to Rand's objectivist ideology, staunchly opposing government regulation of the financial industry even as there were stock market crashes, recessions, savings and loan failures, market bubbles and multiple economic catastrophes on his watch.

It wasn't until October 23, 2008, when he was called to testify before Congress as legions of hardworking American families were losing their homes to foreclosure while the weatlhy executives of insolvent banks were lining up for a trillion dollars' worth of government handouts, that Greenspan admitted to finding a "flaw" in his perception of "the way the world works". "I made a mistake," he confessed, "in presuming that the self-interest of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders' equity in the firms."

Apparently, however, Greenspan's epiphany was short-lived. When interviewed in April of 2010 by ABC News, he was asked, "Isn't it more than a flaw? Isn't it an indictment of Ayn Rand and the view that laissez-faire capitalism can be expected to function properly -- that markets can be trusted to police themselves?"

Greenspan dismissed the question with three words: "Not at all." Sounding almost like one of the "evil" antagonists in Rand's novel, (whose mantra, throughout the book, is "It's not my fault",) Greenspan blamed the financial catastrophe primarily on unnamed insiders in the banking industry, whose one and only "major mistake was assuming what the nature of risks would be."

In the face of such tragic intransigence, what is left for one to do but ... well, shrug?