The Rant Institute

To be a Christian who distrusts the government of a "Christian nation," a government run by politicians who all proclaim to be Christian, is an admission that Christianity not only fails to make people moral, but that anyone who claims to be a Christian should not be trusted.

The desire for eternal life is a form of greed that kills the human capacity to evolve for the benefit of those of our species who will come after us. The worship of a god that sanctifies human sacrifice is a love of death in sheep’s clothing. And to believe that eternal suffering is a form of moral justice is to believe that immeasurable evil should be glorified as an eternal virtue.

Life is how the finite experiences the infinite.

Theists think that everything in the universe is evidence for their God but that all of the horrible things that happen in that universe should not be held against that God but blamed on people. God, in other words, is the serial killer from Saw, and the universe is his torture chamber for teaching people to love him, just in case commanding them to do so and threatening them with eternal hell wasn't enough. 

The word "psyche" is a Greek word that Plato used which means "soul" or "spirit." From this viewpoint, psychology means "knowledge or understanding of the human soul or spirit." European philosophers and theologians had speculated for millennia on the existence and properties of the "soul." But in 1672, Thomas Willis asserted that the "soul" is a function of the human brain rather than the heart or some immaterial entity. The human mind is therefore, the human soul.

the standard for how others treat us is set by how we lean to treat ourselves

The only way to find your other half is to learn to love the half you've got. That's the only way to recognize the best parts of yourself in your other half. If you focus on all of the bad parts about yourself, than the "other half" you find will be a reflection of everything that's wrong with you, rather than what's right with you.

Racism is not born out of a lack of empathy, it is born out of a love for one's class and the privileges that class tends to provide. The less privileges your class provides you, the less conservative you will be in your desire to maintain a system based on classes of people, race and wealth and what have you, while the more privileges your class provides you, the more conservative you will be to defend a "right"  - and often they are thought to be "God given rights" - to enjoy those privileges.    Those who advocate for the status quo, those who wish to maintain the most stability to the system that provides them with the privileges they enjoy, see themselves as being the more "responsible set of men" who contributed to building the system into the monolith that it is. And because they feel responsible for, in some small way, contributing to the virtues of the systems more than to its vices, they feel they have earned the right to enjoy the privi

The story of Adam and Eve is a story of newlyweds who argued about right and wrong while they let the garden they lived in go to waste. And today, waste is an economic virtue, and he who wastes the most is treated like a saint.

Often temptation is nothing more than your future self telling you to stop wasting time, and do something you want, while you still have the chance. Because you never realize how fast it all goes by, until you discover you're riding in the caboose of your life.  

The schizophrenia of the world today can be seen in the fact that, to justify unchecked wealth, we are to believe that we live in a world of plenty, even though we all know that most of the people in the world are homeless and starving.

If people are going crazy, it’s because the world runs on systems that have all of the sanity of a machine.

I am with you, you men and women of a generation, and know how it is.  Walt Whitman If everyone in the world today seems to be running around screaming like chicken little that the sky is falling, do not forget a simple lesson to be taken from it all: more than ever before in history, this is your day. Do not fear it or turn away. Rather, embrace it, for it is here to teach you some hard lessons about life, but they are the most important lessons there are, if ever you hope to understand the truth of the world you are destined to inherit, lessons that most people spend their lifetime trying to escape, hide from, and deny.  The world has not suddenly become a wasteland devoid of hope and possibility, even though the nightly news so often seems to only trumpet such a perspective from the rooftops. Despite what may often feel like an overwhelming fixation on how the world is coming to an abrupt and ugly end tomorrow night, six o'clock sharp, the times you live in are no mo

A television is the cigarette of the mind. It literally vaporizes you’re soul.

The fact that all gods are male makes all men who believe in god spiritually gay.

There is only as much love in fear as there  is blood in a stone. But religion convinces you to have faith that getting the former is the only way to get the latter.

To believe in an afterlife is to believe that this life is not enough. It is to claim that life is a sacred gift from God but that the sacred gift is cruel as hell if it doesn’t come with an eternal reward for having to endure it. It is like saying marriage is a sacramental gift from God but is only worth it if we can expect to be rewarded for suffering through it with a harem and an eternal supply of Viagra.

Monotheism is the worship of either a transsexual God or a machine we think of as a “father.” And today, politics, religions, and economics are machines we think of as a leviathan, a Holy Ghost, and an invisible hand, and all of which we consider to be as gender neutral as a machine.

The more the world felt like hell to him, the more his writing became his only heaven, the more false and dead felt the former, the more real and alive it felt to do the latter. Because it allowed him to see how the splintered reality he had always inhabited in his own mind was purely the result of the reality of the world he had been born into. A world which was "intelligently designed" through a conspiracy of powerful forces - who sometimes compromised but more often went to war with each other when one sought to exert authority over another - to be completely insane, because it's run by a bunch of psychopaths. And if psychopathy is defined as an inability to empathize with other human beings, and nothing impairs a person's ability to empathize with other human beings more than money - because money creates different cultural reality tunnels which we each inhabit and swim in, that are as different as the neighborhoods people live in because of how much money th

Quarantine is a form of national grounding for America's tacit approval of a healthcare system that is forced to always put profits over people, even though most of the people who work in our healthcare system are some of the truest patriots and saints any nation or religion ever had.  And the ones who are, always do it for the people, and never for a profit. Hell, they'd do it for free if they had to.  And maybe a thank you every once and a while.

These days, it's more important and more moral for us to exercise our right to change our beliefs than it is for us to exercise a right to refuse to consider that we could ever be wrong.

  This may sound painfully honest to some people, but in a way, it is the true meaning of Easter .  C. S. Lewis once argued that cowardice was never seen as a virtue. He claimed this objective moral understanding demonstrated the existence of a moral God;  a moral God that created humanity to have this unifying moral understanding, so it would learn how to obey by being forced to accept their suffering was the consequences of their disobedience.  But look at the courage of the "cowards" of World War I. Men whose patriotism was to life itself, more than to their country or their Gods. They were the men often defined as "shell shocked."  Unlike the plethora of brands of designer mental diseases to choose from today, thanks to the billions to be made in "selling sickness" of people's normal response to the pressures of their environment, "shell shock" was an example of how an environment of death and hatred could physically cr

Atheists claim that science is not a religion, and of course it is not. Science, properly understood, is simply a method of investigation. But science properly understood is a rarity these days. It is far more often the case that science is not properly understood at all. Take the example of the medications being sold for fictional psychological conditions like "social anxiety disorder." It is not a "disorder" to have social anxiety in a society where everyone is judged on status and their physical appearance. Nor is a disorder to have such anxiety when your entire social life hangs by a thread, such that one wrong comment, one embarrassing picture, one single moment, can end up destroying your whole economic future in an instant, thanks to social media. Add to this the constant bombardment of images of photo shopped celebrities who are so rich and leisurely they can afford to have plastic surgery for lunch and botox for dinner twice a week, even throwing a part

auburn splinters of day light sifting dusk into twilight swiveling the dark jewelry of night from a gold digger's pan smoked autumn musk perfumes the dusk and glimmers like frost in a twinkling forest soft unsettled shadows shimmer across the silver moon as the sun surrenders in a shiver a candle to the evening bloom as leaves wish to out whisper the wind do our thoughts and our dreams contend yet in all of the moments between now and then I dream of you again

Those who think they must believe in religion have often offered as a justification for doing so as "if you don't believe in something, you'll believe in anything."  Like all claims by religions, since religions all conflate their "beliefs" for truth, the exact opposite is true.  Religion is so valuable to powerful rulers of all stripes, because "Believers" are conditioned and therefore primed to "believe."  As a result, "believers" are far more likely to believe anything and everything, because the only time they ever fully engage their "god given" powers of skepticism is when someone dares to point out that their own particular brand of "God" and religion are just as absurd as every other brand of "God" and religion.   As Gibbons put it in The Decline and Fall Of the Roman Empire: “The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as  equa

The trouble with Christianity is that it teaches us to believe that humans are the only creatures who are made in the image and likeness of God. This then dupes humans into believing that no other creatures could be made in the image and likeness of God more than themselves, not even in another galaxy or another universe. In truth, the only reason humans think they are the highest form of life there is is because humans are incapable of understanding anything more complex than themselves, and mostly because they are incapable of even understanding themselves. And nothing renders them so incapable of doing so as religion. The problem with the Christian religion in particular is not necessarily a believe in God per se but in the kind of God we have chosen to believe in that determines who we are. Because when we believe in God who sacrificed their own children for us we then become willing to sacrifice our own children and even ourselves in order to be loved by such a God. Trouble w

The only thing that makes morality more relative than God is money.

What led me to become an atheist was the realization that "believers" are not only drug addicts addicted to their own endorphins, and thus no different than a heroin addict, but that they also do not love God (if such an infinite abstraction can even really be defined at all), nor do they love people in general.  Rather, "believers" only really love their "beliefs" about what they think the word "God" means, which is always defined for them with a palpable dependence upon paradoxical contradictions, by the brand of religion they happen to subscribe to. That, and the fact that people's devotion to their different "brands" of God and religion has only ever caused far more suffering to others than it has ever provided comfort to anyone

We either cultivate a sense of understanding or a sense of defensiveness. The more we cultivate understanding, the less of a need we have to defend. And the more we cultivate a sense of defensiveness, the more everything looks like an enemy. 

Religion is a form of social distancing from reality.