"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

David Weigel in Slate:

Ryan's trouble comes from the way he described his Rand-lovin' in that 2005 Atlas Society speech. "I go to the 64-page John Galt speech, you know, on the radio at the end," he said.

 

Since Ryan isn't actually an atheist, I just read this as a pander. The Galt speech is one of the most aggressive arguments against Christianity you will ever read. Galt, the leader of the individualists' "strike" against statists who loot their wealth, goes on the radio at the height of the crisis and argues that selfishness is a virtue. "Do not hide behind the cowardly evasion that man is born with free will, but with a 'tendency' to evil," he says. "A free will saddled with a tendency is like a game with loaded dice. It forces man to struggle through the effort of playing, to bear responsibility and pay for the game, but the decision is weighted in favor of a tendency that he had no power to escape. If the tendency is of his choice, he cannot possess it at birth; if it is not of his choice, his will is not free."

That goes against essential Catholic thinking. But there's more!

What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge-he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil-he became a mortal being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor -- he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire-he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness; joy -- all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man’s fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was -- that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love -- he was not man.

Man’s fall, according to your teachers, was that he gained the virtues required to live. These virtues, by their standard, are his Sin. His evil, they charge, is that he’s man. His guilt, they charge, is that he lives.

Get that? Rand-as-Galt is saying that Satan was leading Adam and Eve down the right path when he goaded them into eating the apple. God was enslaving them, as the fear of God would allow future generations to enslave more people. That's the "controversy." I don't assign any of these beliefs to Ryan, but I'd love to hear him talk about them...