The Rant Institute

 Christianity is a religion that requires you to glorify the gift of "free will" by only using your free will to act like being born is just like joining the military, that is, "God's army!" It is to glorify "free will" by deciding to only act like a robot.  This is like glorifying the gift of being able to move as freely as one wishes, to dance and run and jump and skip and so on, by only crawling, on one's hands and knees in supplication, in a straight line, straight to church and home again.  That like glorifying the gift of free food by only eating what your religion puts on the menu out of the hope that you'll be resurrected so you can either eat whatever you want, not have to eat at all, or that for all eternity you will only ever want to eat from the same menu the Church limited you from eating from while you were alive on Earth.  It's like glorifying the gift of a free Lamborghini by never driving it faster than any posted speed lim

Jesus was NOT the first man to "rise from the dead," as if rising from the dead were a more powerful or convincing show of divinity than simply freeing himself from a cross, or even doing to Pilate what Moses had done to the Pharaoh.  One of the arguments offered by Celsus, one of the pagan philosophers against Christianity was that it was pretending to be something it wasn't - something new. Celsus was a Conservative intellectual among Roman pagan philosophers. Like so many Conservatives today, his arguments for NOT accepting the new Jesus religion as valid are EXACTLY what Conservative Christians would argue for NOT accepting a NEW Jesus religion today. As for rising from the dead....   "They say that Zalmoxis, the slave of Pythagoras, also did this among the Scythians, and Pythagoras himself in Italy, and Rhampsinitus in Egypt. The last named played dice with Demeter in Hades and returned bearing a gift from her, a golden napkin. Moreover, they say that Orpheus di

  The Catholic Church has long defended and practiced pederasty. In addition to the great St. Thomas Aquinas supporting pederasty, in 1531, Martin Luther upbraided Pope Leo X [1] for having vetoed a measure that cardinals should restrict the number of boys they kept for their pleasure, "otherwise it would have been spread throughout the world how openly and shamelessly the Pope and the cardinals in Rome practice sodomy." [2]     Nor was Leo the only one.    Guided by Aquinas’s divine perspective on the legitimacy of pederasty, Pope Benedict IX was famous for debauching young boys in the Lateran Palace, leading Saint Peter Damian to describe him as “a demon from hell in the disguise of a priest.” Pope Julius II (1503-13), who commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling, caught syphilis from Rome’s male prostitutes. Pope Boniface VIII (1294-1303), known as a pedophile who massacred the entire population of Palestrina, even famously declared that “pedophil

 "When Christianity gained control of the Roman Empire it suppressed the writings of its critics and even cast them into flames." Robert L. Wilken, The Christians As the Romans Saw Them (New Haven: Yale, 1984), p. xii.

 "To think that the ruler of the universe will run to my assistance and bend the laws of nature for me is the height of arrogance. That implies that everyone else (such as the opposing football team, driver, student, parent) is de -selected, unfavored by God, and that I am special, above it all." Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1992), p. 109. What could be more arrogant than to believe in miracles? To believe that the supreme ruler of the universe has not only bent the laws of nature by which everyone else is bound, but that such a ruler did so as a special favor to you, and also as a special message and invitation to you, which that ruler intentionally withholds from everyone else.  Even the person who believes they know something is a miracle believes that their knowledge of miracles is itself a special knowledge, amounting to a kind of miracle in and of itself, that the God who performed the miracle bestows to his chosen

  When we form images of God, they are all really exhibitions of our lack of faith, as Alan Watts pointed out. They are merely something to hold onto, something to grasp, which is like grasping at water because we feel like we are drowning, or grasping at air because we feel like we are falling. Grasping hold of such images are not acts of faith in the image being held onto to, but faith in our ability to refuse to let go of the images to which we grasp, like a child refusing to let go of their mother's hand at the public library or swimming pool.   It is only when we don’t grasp, like a young bird that leaves the nest trusting its wings will allow it to glide upon the air rather than crash to the earth, only then are we exercising an attitude of true faith. Everything else is a brand, used for identifying cattle and slaves and sheep, as to what plantations they belong.