The Rant Institute

When you are raised your entire life to think about nothing as much as your religion, your salvation, and your God, becoming an atheist does not mean you suddenly no longer think of such thinks anymore. On the contrary, once the conditioning has formatted our minds to work a certain way, over the course of several decades, it is only possible for us to start looking at the horse from the opposite end. In doing so, one can see that the war between sexuality and spirituality, which religion claims is so natural to us all, is actually one that religion alone is responsible for both framing and fostering, much to its sole benefit. When St. Augustine and St Aquinas mercilessly attacked women as perhaps the most evil harlots God could have ever vomited forth into the world, their sentiments were not simply the byproduct of their time and place in history, as Catholics often like to suggest. Rather, these men were no doubt influenced in their loathing of women by many cultural ingredients...

Consider how the actions we engage in as human beings today, often have some harmful effect, however small it maybe, on someone else on the planet. If you use a cell phone, you're contributing to child labor in the mines of the Congo for cobalt. If you drive a car, you're contributing to America's dependence on oil and thus its wars. No matter how attenuated the connection by myriad other things two points may be, there is always a connection, and often there is more than one - a lot more. But all we have to do is find a way of either denying any such connections exist, or that the good of what we do outweighs the negative impact we may have, however unintentionally and ignorant we may be of the ultimate effects of either one. This, then, requires us to actually exercise a God-like hubris in our understanding of how things are connected. And we do this, even though we admit our brains, and even our computers to date, have no ability to map such an infinity. So, ei...

A castle is a fortification designed to keep and enemy out, while a prison is a fortification designed to keep an enemy in. But often, and maybe even always, they are basically the same thing. And both are like our beliefs.  In a sense, everyone is the king of their own castle of ideas, but religion takes this to a higher level by encouraging a person to trust their imagination when it tells them they are doing it, not for themself, but for the glory of God. By believing that their "beliefs" are necessary to survive, have meaning, or even control their own appetites and desires, people are encouraged to become ever more dependent upon the God-drug that all organized religions push. And like the man selling heroin, so religion sells holiness, and both trigger the same release of endorphins in the brain that make a person feel warmly loved. The only difference is that one of these drugs is illegal and the other is legal. And it's not only legal, it's even e...

There are a number of Christians (and Muslims) who think homosexuals should be killed. After all, homosexuality is why God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, still too many of them will insist. I think the vast majority of both (at least I certainly hope the vast majority of both) do not agree with this. But those that do, claim to be "moral" and virtuous, even as they commit murder to avenge an "all powerful God" for having to watch two people of the same gender having sex. Talk about being overly sensitive! Say hello to moral relativism! In this way, such Christians are operating under the "belief" that murder, at least for the right reasons, is not as evil as "sex," even though committing murder is an act of death and sex is an act of life. As such, they allow a Commandment to be overruled by a footnote.  But even among those who disagree with the idea that homosexuals are monstrous pedophiles that need to be killed, there are those who belie...

I was recently reading William Faulkner and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and realized that people still read their words not just because of how they said things with words, but the very ideas those words conveyed. Those ideas were "truths" that anyone who reads them can appreciate, even if on different levels and in different ways. I was also reading The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and the writings of Seneca, and was moved by the precision and clarity of truth which they seemed to effortlessly convey in their prose. This is the same with Shakespeare and countless others, from poets to philosophers and from scientists to shamans. Yet no one reads their words and thinks such "truths" must be properly understood, lest humanity fall into chaos, even though they are so unambiguous in their writings and the Bible is so opaque. Do we argue of the Canterbury Tales or Aesop's Fables, or over the "true" meaning of the Epic of Gilgamesh or the importance of the...

 I am not comforted by the thought that Abraham did not sacrifice Isaac, when I heard he'd been listening to a voice inside his head that, at the last second, told him to go kill an animal instead. Most serial killers start off by killing animals.

Yo God! What up!?  Christians are an ironic bunch in America. The more I study the strange little world you have growing in the mole spores in your basement, the more I marvel at the behavior of that species who proclaims to be humble while insisting they are not only made special, and in your image, but that the entire universe  was made specifically for them. They tend to believe that everything is a kind of propaganda designed to lead them to doubt that their "beliefs" are necessarily "true,"  but they never doubt, for they feel they are not allowed (or are simply not able) to doubt, that what they call "true" is simply a "belief" that isn't true, but is simply the mother of all other propaganda. They even feel they must believe such a conflation or wind up in a place they call "hell," which they also imagine is like the ovens of Auschwitz, that place I told you about earlier, during what many of them refer to as "th...