The Rant Institute

Should we aspire to be whoever or whatever we want to be, or to conform to a mold largely shaped by our parents, or on a larger scale, even the culture we inhabit?   Some people honor their parents by dutifully and obediently subscribing to their parent's points of view, especially about religion.  However different their own point of view may be from that of their parents in the particulars of that religion, many people are nevertheless taught to "honor their parents" by continuing the family tradition of being one religion or another, be it Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Conservative, Socialist, and so on.  But the real way to honor one's parents, and indeed the only way to honor any parent, is by learning to how to shed such points of view so one can think more critically for oneself. For it is only by doing so that a person can ever achieve any true sense of independence, by being nimble enough in their minds to avoid the snares of charlatans selling the sn

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was becoming the shepherd by convincing the world he was the lamb of God. Put another way, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the followers of a man who was as poor as Lazarus, to depend upon and wholly worship the money changers in the temple, so those same followers could be taught to be thankful for the crumbs that "trickled down" to them from the tables of those rich men.  What Lazarus couldn't see from his vantage point on the floor groveling over those crumbs, however, was that the table of a rich man is the altar upon which such men sacrifice the poor, to the only god humanity has left: Money.

the difference between religion and science is the difference between simplicity and complexity.

In a world of venerated traditions and dogmatic religious conformity, the person with a truly original idea is as much Jesus Christ as the devil incarnate.

In biological organisms, the largest and smallest organisms tend to have no patterns or stripes. We see this, for example, in elephants and mice. This physical reality is reflected in states of consciousness as well, in the way that infants and senior citizens have no preconceptions or "learned beliefs" that bias their interpretation of reality. Hence, to become wise one must become like a child, because only with the innocence of a child can one interpret reality without the lens of fear or judgement.  The problem, however, is that as a child, mot people are taught to hate themselves; for either, on the one hand, failing to measure up to a moral ideal of human perfection in an image called "Jesus Christ" - which happens to be an image of moral perfection that, because Jesus is considered to be "God," is completely impossible for any human being to ever achieve, even if they had eternity to try and do so (which only sounds like pure hel

"Every child has a god in him. Our attempts to mold the child will turn the god into a devil. Children come to my school, little devils, hating the world, destructive, unmannerly, lying, thieving, bad tempered. In six months they are happy, healthy children who do no evil". From A. S. Neil's book Summerhill    

There is nothing so cruel as nature, and nothing so beautiful.

Religion is proof that animals understand death better than we do.

There is no greater offense to the Christian "belief" about God than the truth about God. And there are no greater obstacles to understanding what the word "God" means, than the "beliefs" about what that word means peddled by religion. The word "God" is a mental idol worshiped by "believers," who deny that their own subjective interpretations of this word are simply idols and nothing more, because so many billions of people happens to worship a similar idol. The worship of "God" is nothing more than the worship of a "belief" about God, one which thinks of God more in terms of a corporation rather than the power of nature itself.  All monotheistic religions, as a result, are simply the worship of an idealized image of man by mankind. Monotheism, in other words, is the greatest act of Narcissism. 

Given the nature of human complexity, which is only exponentially compounded by our interaction with different and ever evolving complex environments, it is much more likely that the devil created monotheism for the express purpose of driving humanity to slaughter each other over it and its derivatives - as we have done so joyfully and rapaciously in the distant past for Yahweh, Jesus, or Allah, and done for the derivative religions of nationalism and economics more recently - than that "we were made in the image and likeness" of a wholly immaterial "intelligence" (which is like a cow believing it was made in the image and likeness of a fart in the wind) which was clever enough to create the universe from nothing, but when confronted with the problem of taming a humanity that had been programmed by nature itself to slaughter each other over its religions, the best idea that "intelligence" could come up with was to  issue a list of "commandments,"

Loving God despite the fact he "commands" us to do so, and threatens to burn us alive for all eternity if we do not obey His command, is like getting married because someone "commands" you to love them, despite their threats to have you torn apart by wild dogs if you refuse to do so. Hence, a Christian only "loves God" as much as Sansa Stark loves Ramsay Bolton.

In the same way there is no greater sense of irony than the idea that an all powerful being would create a universe that is necessarily infinitely inferior to itself,  so too there is no greater impediment to understanding what the word "God" actually means than the definitions of "God" offered by religion.  Once the mind is shackled with such indelible labels, it is prejudiced forever after in favor of them, and agaisnt any other concepts that seem to challenge or in anyway contradict that first impression. Those labels become the first coat of paint, as it were, upon the blank canvas of our mind, for conceptualizing some vague notion in our head of what we think the word "God" means. From that first conceptualization, we are forever chasing and refining the notion of this word "God" that is forever limited to our experiences, ideas, and environment. It never occurs to us that any and every such concept we have, or have had, or ever wil

Corporations are artificial people who are created in the image and likeness of their God: man.  And man has "intelligently designed" those corporations to have all of the powers of gods, the soul of a rabid animal, and the mentality of a psychopath. It is into their hands that the religion of Capitalism tells us we must deliver ourselves, so that the god of money will continue to rise. 

The Christian sees atheists the same way they see Adam & Eve: as people for whom, because they failed to obey - which means conform to fit the beloved ideal set by their "god," and in whose image Christians believe they were necessarily created - their image of themselves as a morally pure and perfect being, had to die.

Religion is a form of plastic surgery for the soul. Religion compensates for the ugliness it conditions a person to feel on the inside,in other words, with the beauty of an idealized moral perfection of what it means to be human called Jesus Christ - a "God-man" who set the example of what God the Father demands all humans must aspire to live up to - even though God the Father knows full well that all finite things are equally deficient when being measured by such an infinite standard of human perfection as himself. And to ensure that humanity is distracted enough to never notice this undeniable fact of life, God the Father threatens to torture for eternity all those who for fail to spend their life working like Sisyphus to try and achieve what God designed us to be utterly incapable of ever achieving; even if we had eternity to do it.    

A revolution is when people go to war about poverty, while every other kind of war - especially economic - is a war waged for  wealth, where men are animated by the morality of the profit motive.  Religions are used, in this respect, to convince the masses they are really fighting for freedom and God and stuff like that, because no one wants to be a martyr for the wealth of the few, even though that is all most martyrs really are, when you think about it.

Someone once said that "The lovely thing about Jesus was that he was so at home with sinners, because he understood that he wasn't one bit better than they were." The Christian dupes themselves into believing they see themselves as no better than those they define as "sinners," but what they really mean is that they only feel comfortable being around people who agree with them about what a "sinner" is, and are the most uncomfortable when they are around people who fail to "believe" in the same definition.  That is, Christians are only comfortable around those who accept the tradition of defining people as "sinners." What they should be comfortable with, however, is a new perspective that rejects such labels as "sinners" to begin with, as they are simply a means of control by those who lust for power - and nothing more.   By challenging sacred "beliefs" and traditions, Christ was no different than Socrates

The reason you know the Bible is simply a pack of lies is because truth can never be expressed in words. This is illustrated by the fact that Jesus never wrote anything down, for example. And the only way a person can learn this is by first unlearning everything religion teaches (i.e. indoctrinates) a person to "believe," in order to necessarily hide every truth.  Every lesson from religion, as such, is as much a lash that scourges the body of Christ - if by "the body of Christ," we mean humanity as a whole - as it is an offense to truth itself.  The "sin" that Christ was crucified for, in other words, was the sin of being human, of which every human being is born equally condemned and guilty. And as I have said before, if nature comes from God, religion comes from the devil. And who is "the devil"? All those who seek to control others, especially those who claim to speak with the authority of God, and pretend their "beliefs&quo

The reason Christians are so obsessed with sex is because they have renounced the naturalness of sexuality itself, and as such, they are forever caught in the conflict between their "beliefs" about sex and their desires.

Christianity is a religion that promises to save you from eternal torments in the afterlife if you simply sacrifice your own happiness here on earth, in order to love God. God, in other words, doesn't want you to be happy, unless your happiness is entirely dependent upon Him, and nothing else.   This is God's divine will, apparently. In practical terms, this means that God wants you to be forever dependent upon a Christian church somewhere. God, as such, is a true capitalist, for He ensured that He was just enough out of reach of every single person on the planet so that everyone would necessarily need to depend upon one church/religion or another, in order to save themselves from being burned forever in hell.  And for faithfully living a life that is wholly dependent upon God - that is, upon some Christian pastor or priest who alone is authorized to speak for that "God - and for likewise raising their children to also be wholly and emotionally dependent u

If spirituality means waking up, religion means falling in love with a dream by falling asleep. Religion, in other words, hooks users on the fentanyl of faith in a fantasy that exists no where more than in the mind of the addict.  

 Human beings are at least as incapable of understanding "God" - a mere word that stands as a verbal symbol for an infinite abstraction - as an amoeba is in understanding human beings, an atom is in understanding the multiverse, or a light bulb is in understanding human consciousness.  "God," after all, is not a thing, for such a word denotes a purely immaterial "being," but purely an idea - and nothing more! The Everest size hubris of "Christian humility" allows the "believer" to deny that any of this is true, of course. As such, even such an obvious and undeniable truth as this, is completely incapable of stopping "believers" from asserting their right to claim to understand such an infinite abstraction anyway,  and with more certainty than everyone else on the planet and even throughout history. And they do this, just so they can use Jesus as the yardstick by which to measure everything and everyone, even though that y

People everywhere have always paid handsomely to be lied to, which is why religions build temples as big as banks, while speaking the truth is always an act of suicide. Jesus as "the truth" was killed, in other words, so that the lie of Christianity could live.  For Christianity is simply a religion that turns a profit by ritually murdering the truth every Sunday. This is why every Christ throughout history, including Jesus himself, has only ever been  murdered by those who demand their religion over the truth. 

It is as absurd to say that "man is made in the image and likeness of God" as it is for a calculator to claim it was made in the image and likeness of man. In fact, the former is indeed infinitely more absurd than the latter. And it is only with a supreme hubris masquerading as religious humility that any "believer" denies this obvious truth. What's more, this absurdity is matched only by the irony of the fact that it was by believing in the fiction of the former that humanity has allowed itself to be so seduced by its technologies, and as a result, reduced itself to being little more than slaves of the latter.   In Technics and Civilization , Lewis Mumford detailed the long process by which this occurred, with the gradual regimentation of society being infected culturally and psychologically as much through the military as the monastery, with each transforming what it meant to be human from natural animality to the level of a mere calculating machine.

Let us for a moment consider what the Christian is necessarily guilty of "hoping for" if we reverse the arrow of time. By this I mean, if "God" decided to reverse the clock of time itself - which a "God" who can do anything can do as easily as He can create a universe from nothing at all - so that in two thousand years Christians would eventually find themselves living in the days of Jesus, those Christians would suddenly be faced with a dilemma that demonstrates just how utterly useless, and therefore how utterly false, their modern version of Christianity really is, especially when it comes to defining morality. This is because, if time suddenly did move in reverse, and the past became the future, the Christian would suddenly be faced with the question of whether people have free-will, and what they should therefore do with it, if in fact they do. And this question would then be followed by an even worse question: what to do about Jesus himself?