Actually, it’s more complicated than that even among Christians (not to mention other religions). For just one example, there are those sects that believe that God speaks to the individual. Others find that notion fraught with danger because who’s to know if any given individual is truly hearing God or just his own vanity.
Both viewpoints have defenders. But the point is that the debate is centuries old and both sides claimed to be arguing from reason as well as faith.
I say this as an Objectivist for most of my life and as a non-religious person. But I know that without the Judeo-Christian philosophers there would not have been an Enlightenment and there would not have been a Declaration of Independence.
Ironically to this discussion, the group that Rand found most disgusting was not the religious but the libertarians who she disliked even more than conservatives (what are they trying to conserve, she asked). Rand saw libertarians as philosophically un-moored. They had no defining metaphysics. So you had libertarians who were Christians and those who were atheists and those who were leftist pacifists and those who were right wing hawks.
I sometimes call myself a conservative and sometimes a libertarian because the shoe fits and no normal person knows what an Objectivist is. But I have to agree that, when Rand was alive, most conservatives were of the RINO variety and the libertarian movement, though young, was already showing signs of Balkanization and dysfunction.
But, despite all that, unless we in the TEA Party suppress our purist instincts, we will fail. Notice that the socialists and communists fight tooth and nail for the smallest victories and ally with whomever they think will help them win, including Islamo-Facists. If Christians, Jews, Catholics, Hindus, atheists and the rest of us can’t tolerate each other long enough to preserve freedom — we don’t deserve it.
