The Rant Institute

  In "A History of God," Karen Armstrong pointed out that, in ancient Israel, the Rabbis taught that God did not want men and women to suffer. The body should be honored and cared for, "Armstrong writes, and "since it was made in the image of God: it could be sinful to avoid such pleasures as wine or sex, since God had provided them for man’s enjoyment. God was not to be found in suffering and asceticism." Armstrong is echoing what I had read in another book, the Handbook Of Suggestive Therapeutics, Applied Hypnotism, Psychic Science (1917), by Henry S. Munro M.D. As Munro explains: The sexual function of the natural instincts is the strongest of all the bodily appetites. It is a most important source of happiness and health, and its normal performance exercises the most beneficent influence upon all other bodily and mental functions. The want of the gratification of the normal sexual instinct is a source of deep moral and mental suffering, lessens the love...

"I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it."  "Albert Einstein: The Human Side", edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, and published by Princeton University Press.

 There is no greater curiosity than that of a child. And just as great as that curiosity is the creative process of understanding and assimilating information. God has so designed the human brain and nervous system that it needs to ask why as much as a tree needs water. And in answering that question, which it can in an infinite number of ways, it equally has the ability to design unique answers unto itself! And only our ability to ask and answer such questions is what makes us so unique. In fact, as much as a child needs love to thrive, which they need as much as sleep and water, a child loves to learn by asking why, and just as creatively imagining the answers.  Doing so only becomes a major problem when such a child insists their own answers are infallible, and everyone else must be crucified and burned for all eternity for daring to say otherwise.  But then comes the problem - why?  Christianity teaches parents, via spiritual surrogate parents in the roles of pri...

    In the days of Jesus and before, religion was not used to interpret all experiences through the veil of beliefs in dogmatism, but was something that was intended to help people understand how all experiences, however different and unique, were always equally part of a shared human drama. The "living word," in this sense, was the lives of every single person, each of whom constituted a unique and holy gospel of experiences in the universal book of life itself. Cultural theorist Norman Denizen called this idea the universal singular.   The Universal Singular   The universal singular is a term that captures the paradoxical idea that each of us is both unique and universal, and that our lives represent both a singular and a universal experience. Like light, this means we are both a particle and the whole wave. We are not mere drops in the ocean, as Alan Watts said, but the ocean itself experiencing consciousness as droplets.  Like a particle or ...

The popular notion that people need an ego to live and succeed in life is untrue. We can only begin to appreciate who we truly are when we lessen our need to prove ourselves," especially the need to prove ourselves as being worthy to be here in the first place.  According to Christianity, heaven is a place all of us must prove we are worthy of reaching. And until we have and are properly forgiven, hell is a place we are born deserving. For some, gaining access to such a paradise requires merely submission to the will of God, as an act of faith, even though no one can agree, or often make sense out of, what God's will even is. And those with different opinions about that divine will have been killing each other for thousands of years. For others, faith requires works, as if one must prove they are worthy of being moved from the cotton plantation of planet Earth to the mansion of heaven.  All those who fail in this endeavor deserve the eternal tortures of hell they inherit, acco...

The psychologist Jonathan Haidt said there are two ways to get to the truth: the way of the scientist and the way of the lawyer. The scientist observes evidence and looks for patterns and relationships, testing theories to explain them. The lawyer starts with the preferred conclusion and then looks for ways of interpreting everything as evidence to support his view while also trying to discredit evidence or arguments to the contrary. Both are equally trying to find truth, but the two kinds of truth they are trying to find are very different from each other. But just because they are different doesn't mean they are mutually exclusive or wholly incompatible with each other. Rather, they are merely two ways our mind has for perceiving what we call reality.  Both of these perspectives live within each of us, vying for control of the meaning we give to our perceptions and, by extension, our lives. The difference is that one is trying to express a more rationalistic truth while the other...

"Everything that is real was imagined first" Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit    Are thoughts real? To those who have them, they can be as real as they are. Indeed, PTSD is the result of being stuck in a thought from the past, where a memory becomes an iron maiden, and the pain it causes is as real as any physical pain. In fact, some studies show that psychological pain can be even more painful, and therefore more real, than physical pain. Even Descartes linked thoughts to reality when he had the thought, "I think therefore I am." But if the thought Descartes had put into words wasn't real, than he was no more real than his thought. And this is because, according to psychologist Richard Carlson, thoughts aren't real. And since "God" is an immaterial intelligence, isn't God therefore just an idea? And therefore no more real than a thought about what the word "God" means? What are thoughts, anyway?  Like soda bubbles floa...