The Rant Institute

In Mere Christianity , C.S. Lewis sought to reason his way to God’s existence by offering Christians his Argument from Desire. As he put it:  Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for these desires exists. A baby feels hunger; well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim; well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire; well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. ( Mere Christianity , Bk. III, chap. 10, "Hope") Christian apologist Peter Kreeft explains that this argument can only be understood by first noting the difference between natural desires (for things like food, sex, and beauty) and artificial desires (for things like cars, political office, and the Land of Oz). [i] Kreeft also explains that “the natural desires come from within, from our nature, while (artificial desires) ...

We are in love with the God of the lens. A God we created, and continue to create, in our own image. That God is as infinite as we are because we made it in the image and likeness of ourselves.  To put it another way, we have become Narcissus, and fallen in love with our own reflection in the lens of technology. The camera lens, to be more specific, which sees all and records all, was once something that people initially shied away from whenever they saw it. Today, however, half of us will reflexively undress as soon as we notice its presence.  We adore it in the hope that "it" (meaning all those who see us through it once our video goes viral on the internet) will adore us back. To the masses, we video blog our thoughts to its ever eager ears and eyes, as if we were praying to the mind of God himself. And in a way, we are. It quite literally flashes our life before our eyes, but not simply at our moment of death, but rather, at our moment of birth, and for every moment i...

I watched an ant today. It was crawling around on the side of the concrete stoop I was sitting on. It was alone, like I was, and aimlessly walking about. At least it certainly appeared to be aimlessly walking about, that is. It may have known full well where it was going, and been marching there with all the deliberateness of  Caesar crossing the Rubicon, for all I know. Yet it looked as if it was frantically searching for something, like someone on a beach, looking for their car keys in a panic as the sun went down. Maybe it was just trying to figure out where it was (much like myself), or trying to figure out how it got there or where it should go from here (also much like myself ). Or maybe it was looking for something to eat. But what does an ant eat? If it was, in fact, looking for food, it was a good deal more motivated to find it than I was at that moment. There was a deli right across the street from where I was sitting, for example, that, despite the fact I had not had ...

It should be no surprise to anyone that Texas is ranked as the third most racist state in America, right behind Mississippi and Alabama. After all, it has the most restrictive voter ID laws in the country, requires all of its political candidates to believe in the Christian God, and executes more people than any other state in the union. Seriously. Think of it this way: the reason terrorists like ISIS run around lopping off people's heads is because they want to turn the world into Texas. The unfortunate reality of Texas race relations was put on full display recently when a police officer responded to a disturbance at a neighborhood pool party one afternoon. In the process, he transformed an affluent suburb of  Dallas into the Monday Night Raw of  American Racism. About 75 percent of the residents of McKinney are white while nearly 11 percent are black. The police officer who put the city of McKinney on par with places like Ferguson and Baltimore was David Eric Casebolt. ...

Recently, a number of conservatives have been trying to explain away America's income inequality problem. One of them is Niall Ferguson, professor of History at Harvard University. Ferguson believes that incomes are distributed among two kinds of people: those of superior intelligence, whom he refers to as the "cognitive elites," and those of  inferior intelligence found among the lower classes. For him, the growing  financial differences between these two groups is, to put it simply, a byproduct of good breeding. Welcome to the religion of biol ogy , one that has morphed from a "belief" in the in nate biological differences between races , of which Darwin was John the Baptist and Adolf Hitler wa s the messiah, to one based today o n the religion of economics, where infallib ility rest solely in the providence of the almight y dollar.      To support his claim that the biggest bank accounts are simply a reflection of people with the biggest ...