The Rant Institute

God and the Devil are ideas that work like training wheels on our understanding, by allowing us to reduce vague abstractions to personifications. Like Santa Clause who lives in the North Pole and the Bogey Man who hides under our bed or in our closet, we characterize our abstract hopes and fears about life and death, and good and evil, in terms that very much look like exaggerated personifications of ourselves. And in the same way religion convinces us we must subscribe to its stories to have any hope or find any meaning in life, so it has convinced us that we must believe these personifications are actual "beings," so that we will continually run to it for every problem under the sun.  We rely on such personifications because it's a hell of a lot easier for us to think of a friend or an enemy named Dick or Jane, than it is to think about disembodied abstractions about everything we hope and fear. By personifying such abstract ideas into humanistic form, we "anthro

If you are one of those people who get hellfire angry about abortion, maybe you should blame God. Why?  Because God is directly contributing to abortion by giving the "gift of life" to people he already knows are going to have an abortion anyway. On the one hand, Christians believe that all life is a "gift from God." On the other hand, they also believe that abortion is the murder of a baby, even if that "abortion" happens  immediately after conception, like with the RU486 "morning after" pill. But since God is omniscient, giving a gift to people who He knows don't want it, especially in instances of rape (what kind of "father" responds to hearing his daughter was raped by giving her a "gift of life" from her rapist?!), He is at least complicit in the "murder of children," as Christians claim. In short, God is guilty of entrapment. Arguing that God allows people to get pregnant who He "knows" are g

There is no intellectual honesty in deciding that something is true to begin with, and then engaging in herculean efforts to only ever affirm that "belief" must necessarily be true, as if one's eternal soul depends upon it. Indeed, such an approach is the very opposite of seeking "truth" or trying to remain "objective." In fact, there is perhaps no greater act of dishonesty than to claim that a "God" must have placed all the infinite complexity and beauty everywhere in the universe for us to find, as Anthony Flew argues, and all so we would "know" it was God trying to let us know he is behind it all. But to conclude that complexity and beauty prove the existence of God is not to "follow where the argument" leads, as Flew said Socrates admonished him to do, but to be led around by the nose by a "belief" we have either already decided must be true, or one from which who's gravity we are unable to escape.

The difference between American Capitalism and Kremlin Communism is that the former was far more dynamic than the latter, and it was precisely that dynamism that allowed one to reign victorious over the other in November 1989.  Today, we see that same difference between Atheism and Theism, with one seeking to enlighten our understanding with what it discovers (like a child rushing home to show his Dad the cool stuff he learned in science class) while the other seeks only to see the world through the past (like the boy's Dad beating the child for daring to think differently than God allows).  Like Wikipedia vs Microsoft's Encarta, or Open Source code Operating Systems like Linux vs Microsoft's Windows, however, atheism has no centralized hierarchy of power, or dogmas or sacred cows to bow down to, and allows anyone who counts themselves an atheist the freedom to change their opinion and beliefs about anything, regardless of what the evidence has to say on the matter.  And

Ravi Zacharias is an "apologist" (i.e. propagandist/logical magician) for the rising tide of Christian Fascism that swept into the political temple the most blatantly anti-Christ figure the Religious Right has ever championed as their own money-making-messiah and bloated golden calf: Donald Drumpf.  In true Christian fashion, Zacharias offers "the best reply to atheists" about God. But if you look at his reasoning, you see clearly how he manipulates people to rob from the poor and make himself rich, by fooling people into believing that they can ONLY ever have happiness, morality, meaning, and hope, by necessarily "believing" in his God and a "prosperity" religion. As Ravi claims.... "Take the physical universe and you end up with a physical quantity that does not have a reason for existence in itself. It cannot explain it's own origin, which means the physical universe as we see it has to have something that is nonphysical as th

Christians love, love, love to act as if they have the only moral leg to stand on by declaring that all morality comes from God, and that without God, or at least a belief in God, there is no objective standard for morality whatsoever. They even claim that atheists have agreed with this proposition, even though the vast majority have not. The problem with this argument, therefore, is that it is not only wrong, but the exact opposite is true: Christianity and a belief in God are not the basis of all morality, but are instead far more often the very impetuous of all immorality. Most Christians who mistakenly believe that any form of objective morality must be anchored in an idea of a God who can dole out perfectly calibrated quantities of justice in the afterlife via heaven and hell - even though an inability to comprehend either infinity or "God" necessarily negates our ability to be responsible for "offending" either one - never notice that such ideas have only t

Christians love to argue that only if there is a God can we have free will, and that all atheists are determinists. The only problem with this argument is that its not true. We are controlled by what we need, so the saying goes, and if we "need" God to be "happy" or find meaning or to believe in morality and justice, etc, than we are controlled by this "need." Hence, we are not truly "free" to chose what we want to believe if there is a God, and a hell, and so on. In fact, God threatening us with an eternity in Hell if we fail to "believe" in him is far worse than ISIS threatening to cut off our heads if we do not "believe" in Islam, or Christians burning us at the stake for failing to admit we may be in league with their imaginary villain called Satan; because the former is torture for eternity while the latter two are over as soon as we are dead. How then can a person who is threatened with an eternity in hell EVE

"Professing themselves wise they have become FOOLS." Romans 1:22 Here's why the Conservative flame thrower Ben Shapiro is wrong about Transgenderism The former Brietbart News columnist, who later turned on the pro-Trump line the publication had taken under Steve Bannon, warned against “humoring the delusions” of transgender people, because by doing that “you are exacerbating their mental illness.” SHAPIRO: "No. Gender is not disconnected from sex" and "I’m not going to modify basic biology because it threatens your subjective sense of what you are. The idea that sex or gender is malleable is not true." ANSWER:  False.  The idea that gender is disconnected from sex can go either way. First, because both the "mind-body" problem posed in philosophy and the "free will" concept of religion establishes the fact that we cannot know for certain what the connection is between our gender and our genetics on the one hand, n