Is Satan evil?

[Angrboda]

While you're half right (it is mental masturbation), a small bone of contention there, handsome. Fantasy and sci-fi (really, all fiction) is where we work out our ideas about morality along the road to a hero's journey or a coming of age story or whatever way you frame it. We put ideas into environments that hopefully foster better understanding that's applicable to the real world.

Unfortunately, when people take them too seriously, we have...religion.

And whatever you call those tards who follow Atlas Shrugged.

Not exactly true. It was written less as a means to work out ideas about morality and more as a mouthpiece of the author's existing moral code. The main purpose of the book was to showboat her philosophy and Rand didn't even try to disguise the fact.

She never said otherwise. Randian Objectivism has become a religion just as she said. Nathaniel Branden, Rand's heir apparent, listed the following as central tenets of Objectivism to which followers were to adhere(*):

1) Ayn Rand is the greatest human being who has ever lived.
2) Atlas Shrugged is the greatest human achievement in the history of the world.
3) Ayn Rand, by virtue of her philosophical genius, is the supreme arbiter in any issue pertaining to what is rational, moral, or appropriate to man's life on earth.
4) No one can be a good Objectivist who does not admire what Ayn Rand admires and condemn what Ayn Rand condemns.
5) No one can be a fully consistent individualist who disagrees with Ayn Rand on any fundamental issue.

Now, I don't know what standard you use to determine if something is or is not a religion is, but that appears to fit the bill of the summerqueen's contention that the followers of Ayn Rand have taken her and her novel too seriously and made of it a secular religion, so to speak.


(*) (From Judgement Day: My Years With Ayn Rand, Nathaniel Brandon, quoted in The Believing Brain by Michael Shermer. Numbering added for clarity.)