The Rant Institute

 what is love? there are two kinds: conditional and unconditional. in unconditional love, you can share with someone your darkest secrets and doubts, and know they will never use them against you. How do you know they won't?  Because those darkest secrets and doubts only make the person love you all the more. By doing so, those secrets and doubts become a playground for reinventing yourself.  in conditional love, sharing your darkest fears and doubts means living in fear they may one day use them against you. How do you know?  Because those darkest secrets and doubts are what you hide, even from yourself. They are what you are ashamed of, and steer clear of.  the former grant you the freedom to be whoever you want to be. the latter forces you to be who and what someone else wants you to be One is the only possible way of exercising free will, and the other is a necessary exercise of faith.

 I was raised Catholic.  That means I am "unworthy." Or so they tell me.  What am I so "unworthy" of? The full forgiveness of God.  They tell me God "loves" me.  Why else would He do to His own son what He should rightfully do to me? But even the torture and murder of His own son is not enough for God's love to fully forgive and "cure" me.  Forgive and cure me for what? For being born with the stain of original sin on my soul. That means I was necessarily born less perfect than Jesus. It also means I was born into a species that so offended God that, rather than choosing to get over it, He decided instead to ensure the stain of that offense attaches to every member of my species He creates, but for Himself, and then requires us to spend our life asking for forgiveness for the unavoidable results of having been born with such a stain.  Ironically enough, without such a stain, God could never have depended on our species to murder an innocent m...

Have you ever noticed that the word "transcendence" can have very different meanings, depending on who is defining it? While they look similar at first, the way Roman Catholicism and Carl Jung define transcendence function as complete opposites under the hood. The two are as different from each other as fast food is from health food.  And to rationalize the former is like believing a sugar addiction must mean God designed us to hate vegetables in order to shorten our life so we would get our greatest craving of all finally satisfied: an eternity with the God of sugar. In  religious experience , transcendence is a state of being that has overcome the limitations of physical existence, and by some definitions, has also become independent of it. Such a state can only be reached by studying the Bible, and only with the guidance of those God has given authority to interpret its cryptic prose and poetry .   For Jung, transcendence is something very different. While religio...

 Fear of meaninglessness is externalized as "faith" in a divine story that gives meaning to those who both need such meaning (to make the carrying of the cross of their own mortality bearable), and who lack the imagination and the courage to create such meaning for themselves.  Ironically, each such person operates under the delusion that the story they hold in their head and heart is the same story shared by billions of other people. In truth, however, each story is only similar in character names and general events, but the meanings and the version of that story is always unique to each person's own imagination.  And even if the story is perfectly true in every respect, the grand illusion is that everyone who feels a need or desire to devote themselves to defending it as true (which is like people devoting their lives to defending the fact the earth revolves around the sun), imagines the story the same way they do.    After all, if a different version o...

 If Jesus came to the US today seeking asylum from being crucified by the Sanhedrin, Christian Conservatives would tell him there's no place for him here until he comes here through the legal process, and send him back to be crucified, and justify his crucifixion in part because of his attempt to come to the US illegally to escape being crucified by the Sanhedrin.