The Rant Institute

The attempt to escape from pain, is what creates more pain. The greatest damage done by neglect, trauma or emotional loss is not the immediate pain they inflict but the long-term distortions they induce in the way a developing child will continue to interpret the world and her situation in it.   Gabor Mate   This is a brief synopsis of how religious trauma acts like the flapping of a butterfly's wings to create a hurricane that produces witch hunts and even fascism. And it all starts with how we teach our children to believe they are ugly ducklings.   This is part one of four. According to psychologist and best-selling author Stephanie Marston, children see their parents as authority figures and even like gods. As a result, children also think that the way their parents treat them is the way they deserve to be treated. “What you say about me is what I am’ is a literal truth to your child,” Marston points out. When treated with respect, a child concludes that they d...

What kind of parent who has the ability to ensure their child could be born perfectly healthy in every way would ever willingly choose to have their child born with a defect instead, whether physical or spiritual? That’s like a pregnant mother ingesting drugs, not because she’s addicted to them, but because she’s hoping to give birth to a child who will have to depend on her for the rest of its life.  And why does the mother seek to give birth to a handicap child rather than one that is perfectly healthy?  Like the Christian God, so she will feel loved and needed by her child for the rest of her life, regardless of how this emotional dependence warps the child's own emotional development, because love and emotional dependency are opposed to each other.

 Fear of the uncertainties of tomorrow are often the  conditioned responses to trauma from our past being projected onto the blank screen of tomorrow. 

Needing a god or religion as a security blanket against the unknown is like refusing to go into the ocean without a life preserver 

"Not long ago I was sleeping in a cabin in the woods and was awoken in the middle of the night by the sounds of a struggle between two animals. Cries of terror and extreme agony rent the night, intermingled with the sounds of jaws snapping bones and fle sh being torn from limbs. One animal was being savagely attacked, killed and then devoured by another. "A clearer case of a horrible event in nature, a natural evil, has never been presented to me. It seemed to me self-evident that the natural law that animals must savagely kill and devour each other in order to survive was an evil natural law and that the obtaining of this law was sufficient evidence that God did not exist. If I held a certain epistemological theory about "basic beliefs", I might conclude from this experience that my intuition that there is no God co-existing with this horror was a "basic belief" and thus that I am epistemically entitled to be an atheist without needing to jus...

 "If the New Testament accounts could support a range of interpretations, why did orthodox Christians in the second century insist on a literal view of resurrection and reject all others as heretical? . . .  [W]hen we examine its practical effect on the Christian movement, we can see, paradoxically, that the doctrine of bodily resurrection also serves an essential political function: it legitimizes the authority of certain men who claim to exercise leadership over the churches as the successors of the apostle Peter. From the second century, the doctrine has served to validate the apostolic succession of bishops, the basis of papal authority to this day. Gnostic Christians who interpret resurrection in other ways have a lesser claim to authority: when they claim priority over the orthodox, they are denounced as heretics."  Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels , (New York: Vintage, 1989), pp. 7.  

  "What makes a free thinker is not his beliefs, but the way in which he holds them. If he holds them because his elders told him they were true when he was young, or if he holds them because if he did not he would be unhappy, his thought is not free; but if he holds them because, after careful thought, he finds a balance of evidence in their favor, then his thought is free, however odd his conclusions may seem."  Bertrand Russell, "The Value of Free Thought: How to Become a Truth-Seeker and Break the Chains of Mental Slavery" (1944) in  Bertrand Russell on God and Religion  (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), pp. 239-40. The statement above is important because it is not about whether a person may come to conclude, and therefore chooses to believe, that there is a god of one sort or another. Indeed, "however odd his conclusions may seem" means a person is as free to believe or not believe in a God as they see fit.   The trouble is when they have reached thei...