The Rant Institute

"Cogito Ergo Sum" - I think therefore I am.  When the French philosopher Rene Descartes dug to the bottom of his philosophy, the only thing he found there amid the tattered ruins and bombed out shelters of his former beliefs, was the reflection of his own doubt.  Those doubts  "became a fundamental element of Western philosophy, as it was perceived to form a foundation for all knowledge. While other knowledge could be a figment of imagination, deception or mistake, the very act of doubting one's own existence serves to some people as proof of the reality of one's own existence, or at least that of one's thought." "The statement is sometimes given as Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum (English: "I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am"). A common mistake is that people take the statement as proof that they, as a human person, exist. However, it is a severely limited conclusion that does nothing to prove that one's own body exists, l

This is a tribute poem to 9/11 stitched together purely from various poems by Walt Whitman. In other words, I like to think of it as Whitman’s tribute to 9/11. When the thunder-cracking guns arouse me,   and million-footed Manhattan unpent descends to her pavements, … I will sing you a song of what I behold …Libertad.   When the facades of the houses are alive with people, when eyes      gaze riveted tens of thousands at a time When Broadway is entirely given up to foot-passengers and     foot-standers, when the mass is densest, I too arising, answering, descend to the pavements, merge with the     crowd, and gaze with them… To us, my city, Where our tall-topt marble and iron beauties range on opposite     sides, to walk in the space between, To-day our Antipodes comes.   it moves changing, a kaleidoscope divine, it moves changing before us. When the fire-flashing, when rude clouds canopy my city When gorgeous the countless straight stems, thicken with col

11 years already since that day in September when everything changed    oh how I remember A warm sunny day  the summer's last kiss  ended in tears for those we miss  as the sky was ripped open  and the world was awoken, from a dream to a  nightmare of “bombs bursting in air” when Giuliani became The countries mayor And police and fireman,  heroes without compare Great Britain played our national anthem in Buckingham square to remind us we’re not alone in the grief we all bear 11 years since a nation turned to God in prayer and we told all those we love just how much we care since vigils and candles scented the midnight air and God Bless America rang from the Capital stairs since bucket brigades tirelessly worked beneath the halogen glare and red, white and blue blossomed from everywhere since we forgot about  “who wants to marry a millionaire” and we longed for those days of Ginger Rogers and Fred

 Another argument offered by theists as evidence of God is the argument from motion. This argument says that, because things move, God must have moved them. God, so the reasoning goes, is the "unmoved mover" who makes all things move. God, in other words, is the Motion Maker.      On its face, this argument relies implicitly on the division made between potential vs. actual motion, which is a division based on an Aristotelian world view.  This world view, however, is as outdated a belief as that of a geocentric universe.  "The Michelson-Moreley Experiment of 1887 undid much of Aristotle’s world view" and, by extension, Aquinas’s argument (since the latter is premised on the accuracy of the former). "Special relativity further explained how “motion” is no longer a property of just “one thing” – the observer or the object – but of both the observer and the object," independently or simultaneously.  Special relativity, then, helped show how the beli

  In my previous post I wrote about a number of problems with the argument from, and thus the difficulties of applying a yardstick of, Degrees of Perfection (DOP). The argument assumes that "degrees of perfection" implies the existence of a "perfect being" that can be called God. This assumes, of course, that “degrees of perfection”  is not only objectively real, but culminates in the embodiment of God.  A question that the argument fails to answer, however, is why we must assume that “degrees of perfection” indicates a "perfect being" any more than degrees of temperature indicates a perfect temperature.      The DOP argument assumes that, at some point, we can reach the ultimate perfection of God, or that perfection, by being infinite in degrees, should be called God. Either conclusion is problematic, however. If we say the DOP can reach an "ultimate perfection" then we are reducing an infinite God to some finite standard. On the other hand,

If you believe in God, there's probably a good chance you also believe that God performs miracles every now and then, to not only remind the world that He hasn't forgotten us, but also to advertise His mercy and benevolence to believers and nonbelievers alike - at least that is, until the dreaded "judgement day." Perhaps the greatest miracle today, however, is the fact that there are still people in the world who believe that "miracles" come from a God.  For many "believers," on the other hand, it's as much of a miracle to them that people don't believe in their particular brand of "God" as it is for them to discover that people don't believe such a "God" performs miracles at all; and especially not for all those He's thrown into the torture chamber of our reality - with the apparent intent of using religion to turn us all into "demons" towards each other, because of our differences.