The Rant Institute

The trouble with pro-life people who oppose abortion is that they fail to understand that for most people today, thanks in a major way to their Republican Party, to be born into this world is no different than being condemned to hell.

By far the greatest story there is is one that has never been told. That story is the story of how and why we came to worship a single story as “the greatest story ever told.” To tell that story is to map the genome of God, and how it  metastasized in our minds and shaped everything from the wheel to the World Wide Web, from money to messiahs, and from ideas about gravity to our understanding about space and time. That is the story I wish to tell.

The altar of Catholicism is the bed of Procrustes.

Religion is to human reason what magic is to hard science.     

All of our sacred belief systems deserve to be challenged, because, as D.S. Clarke pointed out in his book Panpsychism and the Religious Attitude , "to sit back and refuse to accept the challenge is, in effect, to contribute to the continuance of their reign." Indeed, only by forever challenging every "truth" we find, can we ever hope to find any truth at all. Lies are the eternal enemy of truth. And agaisnt the enemy, as written in the Law of the Twelve Tables, revendication is eternal.

Conservatism in theory is simply a religion based on libertarianism, but in practice it publicly subsidizes agriculture, technology, energy, financial, defense, science, medical research, the prison industries, and even religion, while condemning any suggestion of public subsidization of health or education as Communism or Socialism. Conservatives also fail to understand that there are only two classes of people politicians ever talk about: real people and fictional people. Fictional people are corporations, otherwise called legal fictions. And whenever Conservative Republicans talk about liberty, this only ever produces greater freedom for the latter, to increasingly enslave the former, in the bondage of  debt.

Money men know that all they have to do is give a liberal enough money and they'll eventually turn into a conservative. This process also works at the same time in the reverse as well, of course.  And a stable economy depends as much on the asymmetry the two must always retain in relation to each other, as always having the right proportion of both. But those proportions are not static, thanks to our technology, and are simply the result of the particular brands and versions of the "beliefs" we happen to have about the nature of money, property, and power. But those beliefs obviously need to be changed, which is the last thing anyone with money, property, or power, would want.    It is not that these ideas are necessarily anathema to forming any truly moral society, although we often fail to see or understand the many valid arguments offered for why they may very well be, from people like P. J. Proudhon in "What is Property? " It is that the ideas w...