The Rant Institute

We think we are scientists discovering truth when we are really just lawyers who are arguing for positions we arrived at by other means, wrote Jonathan Haidt, and if you doubt this, he continued, just look around and realize we think this is the case with everyone else, and everyone else thinks the same thing of us. We are NOT primarily rational beings, is the point Haidt is making, despite the attempt by theologians to addict people to the logical porn of philosophy while condemning all those who prefer sex to sophistry. Sex, in fact, is no less an addiction to the same endorphins released in our brains from arguing we are "right" about something, whether that something is God, our political positions, the superiority of our sports team, whether our pessimism is more warranted than optimism, and virtually everything else. God, in this respect, is an idea that addicts us to our own endorphins as much as any video game or gambling addiction (which Pascal's wager capita...

Humans who believe they will live forever after they die live in denial of their place in the universe, elevating themselves to an importance and power that is even greater than the entire universe itself. That is to say, although humans are convinced they know enough about the universe to confidently claim the universe itself has a beginning and an end (yeah, there's no hubris in such an assumption), they are likewise convinced that they will live forever, in a state of either pain or pleasure, and all because they simply "believe" they will. And in this assumption, humans elevate themselves to the status of a god, even as they condemn the "devil" for committing the greatest sin of all by daring to try and do the same thing. And worse still, all those who insist they will "live forever" claim they are only ever being the most "humble" by making such a claim. In short, the belief in salvation turns every vice into a virtue, which is why...

How in the hell is it that "man," which is a material being, beleives he is "made" in the image and likeness of a "God" that said "man" insists is an altogether immaterial being? Is a tree made in the image of an immaterial archetype of a tree? Are not archetypes themselves wholly man made cognitive concepts, which we then project into the mind of a divine intelligence, that we simply assume shares all of the same concepts of beauty, proportion, logic, morality, etc, as ourselves, but only with an infinitly perfected sense of such things, that we can only hope to gleam (if we are good, for goodness sake) upon the death of the material meat prison we are all born into called our human body? That humanity stands today armed with ever increasing evidence, and from every field of study, of just how stupendously wrong we have been about virtually everything we have ever known, or thought we knew, or "believed" we knew, does not for a s...

Americans are addicted to opioids because America is addicted to capitalism. Or to put it another way, our drug addiction is a result of our gambling addiction.  And both of these addictions are the result of our addiction to achieving "perfection," whether spiritually through our "beliefs" about what it means to be a "perfect" child of God, exemplified in our quest to be ever more like Jesus (I.e. a quest to, like the devil, be like god), or physically through Botox, drugs, and plastic surgery. And addiction, after all, is a disease. Our quest for perfection is not only the source of our divisions, however, but likewise our greatest source of shame, while our flaws are often what unite us the most, because they prove that we are all only human.

It has been said that if the God of the Bible existed, it would be the most horrible thing we could ever imagine.  That's certainly what one discovers from reading the Bible! Hell, just look at what he did to his own son, what he did to the world overall with a flood, to countless other of his "children" through plagues and famines, and even his own "chosen people" during their exodus from the Pharaohs of Egypt! I mean, can anyone really blame them, after being lead around the desert to die for forty years, for losing faith!? And for all those who did, Moses slaughtered them mercilesslely at yaweh's behest. Hell, just think about the prospect of having created an eternal "hell" in the first place, whatever it may be. In truth, the god of the Bible most likely murdered all of the other gods like a Stalin or an Al Capone, just to rule the universe so he could torture all those who dared to tell the truth about just how much of a monster he real...

If one reads of the "intransigence" of the Pharaohs when dealing with "God"s people," and the Pharaohs unwillingness to ever consider a different point of view from his own, it is one of the great miracles of faith that this "intransigence" is condemned by Christians as the greatest vice, even as the same Christians far exceed such "intransigence" as their own greatest virtue. If a Pharaoh refuses to change his mind, in other words, it's a sin, but when the Christian is even more obstinate in their refusal to change their mind, despite overwhelming evidence, even to the point that they are willing to die before they would ever consider their "beliefs" are only as human as they are,  the Christian counts such adamant obstinacy as the highest virtue and proof of their "faith." That the Christian has no evidence for their "beliefs" but pure emotion, buttressed by reasoning grounded in a bloody book called t...

Psychiatry is doing to the human mind what Capitalism itself is doing to the whole world. While the latter addicts people to products they don't need, destroying the complex biodiversity of the environment that the capitalist neither understands nor seems very much to care about, in ways that are only leading to ecocide, so big pharma is doing the exact same thing with our minds, addicting people to drugs they don't need while disrupting the hyper complex system of the human mind - which is as much matter as it is pure thought and emotion - in ways that only lead more and more people to suicide. Our hubris about our own intelligence only puts every god or devil to shame.