The Rant Institute

Have you ever noticed that the word "transcendence" can have very different meanings, depending on who is defining it? While they look similar at first, the way Roman Catholicism and Carl Jung define transcendence function as complete opposites under the hood. The two are as different from each other as fast food is from health food.  And to rationalize the former is like believing a sugar addiction must mean God designed us to hate vegetables in order to shorten our life so we would get our greatest craving of all finally satisfied: an eternity with the God of sugar. In  religious experience , transcendence is a state of being that has overcome the limitations of physical existence, and by some definitions, has also become independent of it. Such a state can only be reached by studying the Bible, and only with the guidance of those God has given authority to interpret its cryptic prose and poetry .   For Jung, transcendence is something very different. While religio...

 Fear of meaninglessness is externalized as "faith" in a divine story that gives meaning to those who both need such meaning (to make the carrying of the cross of their own mortality bearable), and who lack the imagination and the courage to create such meaning for themselves.  Ironically, each such person operates under the delusion that the story they hold in their head and heart is the same story shared by billions of other people. In truth, however, each story is only similar in character names and general events, but the meanings and the version of that story is always unique to each person's own imagination.  And even if the story is perfectly true in every respect, the grand illusion is that everyone who feels a need or desire to devote themselves to defending it as true (which is like people devoting their lives to defending the fact the earth revolves around the sun), imagines the story the same way they do.    After all, if a different version o...

 If Jesus came to the US today seeking asylum from being crucified by the Sanhedrin, Christian Conservatives would tell him there's no place for him here until he comes here through the legal process, and send him back to be crucified, and justify his crucifixion in part because of his attempt to come to the US illegally to escape being crucified by the Sanhedrin. 

 Have you ever noticed how the Book of Revelation, if it is interpreted as a prophetic vision of the end of times on earth, only demonstrates that Christianity is a plan that God "intelligently designed" to fail?  This is obvious when we consider that as the last book of the Bible - spoiler alert! - it tells us that God knows his best efforts to "save" humanity are ultimately doomed to fail, leading God to lose his shit and utterly destroy the whole of humanity just to start over with a "new" and better plan. Why didn't God just START with the'New" and better plan to begin with? Why do we see a trend of God repeatedly destroying cities, wiping out creation with a flood, and eventually opting for an apocalypse? Why does God repeatedly punish Humanity for the "sins" He chooses to be so angry about, sins that God could but chooses to never intervene in to prevent or mitigate because we have "free will," but never bothers to si...

🔵 The following passages are taken from a not very widely known interview with Michel Foucault, containing some of the most crucial statements by him on his stance on morals. "In a sense, I am a moralist, insofar as I believe that one of the tasks, one of the meanings of human existence—the source of human freedom—is never to accept anything as definitive, untouchable, obvious, or immobile. No aspect of reality should be allowed to become a definitive and inhuman law for us." "We have to rise up against all forms of power—but not just power in the narrow sense of the word, referring to the power of a government or of one social group over another: these are only a few particular instances of power." "Power is anything that tends to render immobile and untouchable those things that are offered to us as real, as true, as good." "This doesn’t mean that one must live in an indefinite discontinuity. But what I mean is that one must consider all the points...

 “All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes — all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the earth into a graveyard, into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its rememberance. Then we become the grave diggers.” ~Rod Serling, from “Death’s Head Revisited” (1961)