The Rant Institute

 Requiring people to "love" and accept Jesus as your "savior" before they die for fear of deserving to be cast into hell if they don't is like requiring a fetus to "love" and fully accept their parents before they are born - regardless of what kind of parents them may be - for fear of deserving to be cast straight from the womb into an oven if they don't.

  If God is all-powerful, why does he need a blood sacrifice to forgive humanity for using the gift of "free will" to disobey commands issued from an institutional Church - a Church that often disobeys those very same commands?

 No Christian or any other monotheist can explain, or has ever offered to explain, why God feels a need or desire to blame or "punish" human imperfection, especially given the fact that said "God" designed us to not only be so imperfect, but gave us the free will to use our imperfections as freely as we wish! Indeed, if we were all "perfect" in the same way Jesus was, we would all act like perfectly obedient robots, even unto being crucified despite being both perfect and thus also perfectly innocent! In other words, our diversity and creativity are only possible BECAUSE WE ARE IMPERFECT! How is God punishing us then not like a kid smashing his failed science project to pieces out of frustration that it didn't work as "perfectly" as he'd hoped it would, even though the point of the experiment was to create something that was both capable and "free" to do and become whatever it wanted or liked?  That's like creating an AI mac...

  Few Americans know that Thomas Jefferson wrote, in a letter to a nephew: “Question with boldness even the existence of a God.” Or that Albert Einstein said: “I do not believe in a personal God, and I have never denied this, but have expressed it clearly.” Or that Mark Twain wrote in his journal: “I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious — unless he purposely shuts the eyes of his mind and keep them shut by force.” Or that Thomas Paine wrote in  The Age of Reason : “All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.” Or that Clarence Darrow said, in a 1930 speech in Toronto: “I don’t believe in God because I don’t believe in Mother Goose.”

 There is an irreducible difference between the world and our experience of it. We as human beings do not operate directly on the world. Each of us creates a representation of the world in which we live - that is, we create a map or model which we use to generate our behavior. That map, however similar it may be to that of others, is always unique to ourselves, the way our fingerprint or DNA is similar to others but also unique to ourselves. So too, our definitions and ideas of "God" are just as unique, however similar they may be to the definitions and ideas of others about the same word. Our representation of the world determines to a large degree what our experience of the world will be, how we will perceive the world, what choices we will see available to us as we live in the world.  Religion, however, not only claims that it is the only lens through which the "truth" map or model of the world or ideas of "God" can be known, despite it being wrong in i...

 those who kill and die and sacrifice their life for stories they hold to be sacred or divine or both, as a rule, often know little to nothing about the art of writing, and even less about the art and nature of storytelling. Indeed, the degree to which one is devoted to defending the former is always equal to how deficient they are in the latter.