Project Reason has announced the finalists for its video contest.
In my view, the best of the bunch is “Think,” an elegant silent cartoon about succeeding through reason:
My second-favorite video is “The Tutor,” about a woman who tells children some lesser-known Bible stories:
I also enjoyed “New Age Medic,” which pokes fun at some of the sillier forms of “treatments” on the market:
While I too submitted a video to the contest, I had no illusions I would become a finalist. (Because of delayed permissions, I didn’t actually start the video until the day it was due.) My cinematography leaves much to be desired, and several people have been quick to point out that my handwriting is atrocious. However, the content is interesting.
What inspired me to make the video is that, though Ayn Rand preceded Sam Harris in attacking moral skepticism and relativism by half a century,Harris’s book contains not a single reference to Rand, not even in a footnote, judging from Amazon’s “Search Inside This Book” feature. And Harris’s moral theory suffers myriad weaknesses that Rand corrects.(Project Reason “was founded by Sam Harris and Annaka Harris.”) So I submitted a video not to try to win the contest, but simply to point out to Harris and others that, if they regard well-being as central to morality and see moral relativism as dangerous, they ought to take a look at what Rand had to say on those matters.