The Rant Institute

When you are raised your entire life to think about nothing as much as your religion, your salvation, and your God, becoming an atheist does not mean you suddenly no longer think of such thinks anymore. On the contrary, once the conditioning has formatted our minds to work a certain way, over the course of several decades, it is only possible for us to start looking at the horse from the opposite end. In doing so, one can see that the war between sexuality and spirituality, which religion claims is so natural to us all, is actually one that religion alone is responsible for both framing and fostering, much to its sole benefit. When St. Augustine and St Aquinas mercilessly attacked women as perhaps the most evil harlots God could have ever vomited forth into the world, their sentiments were not simply the byproduct of their time and place in history, as Catholics often like to suggest. Rather, these men were no doubt influenced in their loathing of women by many cultural ingredients...

Consider how the actions we engage in as human beings today, often have some harmful effect, however small it maybe, on someone else on the planet. If you use a cell phone, you're contributing to child labor in the mines of the Congo for cobalt. If you drive a car, you're contributing to America's dependence on oil and thus its wars. No matter how attenuated the connection by myriad other things two points may be, there is always a connection, and often there is more than one - a lot more. But all we have to do is find a way of either denying any such connections exist, or that the good of what we do outweighs the negative impact we may have, however unintentionally and ignorant we may be of the ultimate effects of either one. This, then, requires us to actually exercise a God-like hubris in our understanding of how things are connected. And we do this, even though we admit our brains, and even our computers to date, have no ability to map such an infinity. So, ei...

A castle is a fortification designed to keep and enemy out, while a prison is a fortification designed to keep an enemy in. But often, and maybe even always, they are basically the same thing. And both are like our beliefs.  In a sense, everyone is the king of their own castle of ideas, but religion takes this to a higher level by encouraging a person to trust their imagination when it tells them they are doing it, not for themself, but for the glory of God. By believing that their "beliefs" are necessary to survive, have meaning, or even control their own appetites and desires, people are encouraged to become ever more dependent upon the God-drug that all organized religions push. And like the man selling heroin, so religion sells holiness, and both trigger the same release of endorphins in the brain that make a person feel warmly loved. The only difference is that one of these drugs is illegal and the other is legal. And it's not only legal, it's even e...

There are a number of Christians (and Muslims) who think homosexuals should be killed. After all, homosexuality is why God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, still too many of them will insist. I think the vast majority of both (at least I certainly hope the vast majority of both) do not agree with this. But those that do, claim to be "moral" and virtuous, even as they commit murder to avenge an "all powerful God" for having to watch two people of the same gender having sex. Talk about being overly sensitive! Say hello to moral relativism! In this way, such Christians are operating under the "belief" that murder, at least for the right reasons, is not as evil as "sex," even though committing murder is an act of death and sex is an act of life. As such, they allow a Commandment to be overruled by a footnote.  But even among those who disagree with the idea that homosexuals are monstrous pedophiles that need to be killed, there are those who belie...

I was recently reading William Faulkner and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and realized that people still read their words not just because of how they said things with words, but the very ideas those words conveyed. Those ideas were "truths" that anyone who reads them can appreciate, even if on different levels and in different ways. I was also reading The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and the writings of Seneca, and was moved by the precision and clarity of truth which they seemed to effortlessly convey in their prose. This is the same with Shakespeare and countless others, from poets to philosophers and from scientists to shamans. Yet no one reads their words and thinks such "truths" must be properly understood, lest humanity fall into chaos, even though they are so unambiguous in their writings and the Bible is so opaque. Do we argue of the Canterbury Tales or Aesop's Fables, or over the "true" meaning of the Epic of Gilgamesh or the importance of the...

 I am not comforted by the thought that Abraham did not sacrifice Isaac, when I heard he'd been listening to a voice inside his head that, at the last second, told him to go kill an animal instead. Most serial killers start off by killing animals.

Yo God! What up!?  Christians are an ironic bunch in America. The more I study the strange little world you have growing in the mole spores in your basement, the more I marvel at the behavior of that species who proclaims to be humble while insisting they are not only made special, and in your image, but that the entire universe  was made specifically for them. They tend to believe that everything is a kind of propaganda designed to lead them to doubt that their "beliefs" are necessarily "true,"  but they never doubt, for they feel they are not allowed (or are simply not able) to doubt, that what they call "true" is simply a "belief" that isn't true, but is simply the mother of all other propaganda. They even feel they must believe such a conflation or wind up in a place they call "hell," which they also imagine is like the ovens of Auschwitz, that place I told you about earlier, during what many of them refer to as "th...

If an extraterrestrial alien species landed on Earth and encountered humanity, why would we not think that they would treat humanity the same way humanity has treated every other living species on the planet? And in so doing, would they not be treating us exactly as God did, in the Old Testament? And since we are "made in the image and likeness of God," no wonder what God did to different peoples and eventually humanity overall in the Old Testament looks so much like what we have all been doing to each other ever since. In fact, if Christians or Muslims encountered an advanced alien species of far greater intelligence than our own (since we all so often assume that all other species on Earth are far less intelligent than ourselves), would they not, at the first sign that such aliens would either refuse to accept or threaten to reform the entirety of their religious beliefs, treat such an advanced species no differently from the chickens, deer, or insect, or even the low...

The US Financier and Railroad businessman Jay Gould, once said he could "hire half of the working class to kill the other half." And if you look around, it doesn't seem so far fetched, if you think about it. Basically, half of the people in the world are waking up to the reality that war is ultimately always the culmination of artificially created means of division, from race and creed to economic class and country, and the other half which is willing to go to war to prove such divisions are not only real but necessary. It's as if such a taxonomy of people, one that ranks everyone's own race above that of every other, can only be overcome by other lesser races by learning the culture and the language (i.e. the "beliefs")  of the race of the "chosen" people. It is to assume, in other words, that everyone else is born with a defect (i.e. original sin), but can be redeemed by their assimilation and conformity to that culture (i.e. they are con...

Two basic activities that both humans and all other species engage in are sex and murder. Virtually all species are forced to eat some other living thing to survive (although a "merciful" omnipotent God could've obviously created a world where this was completely unnecessary) and nearly all species rely on sex, for both pleasure itself and to produce offspring. Yet these two activities are rationalized within the Christian mind in two very different ways. Even though murder is one of the "sins" explicitly forbidden by God in the Ten Commandments, "sex" in many forms is thought by many Christians to be expressly forbidden, even though the only mention of it in the Ten Commandments is limited specifically to adultery.(Christians have gotten around this rule concerning adultery, by the way, by simply implementing polygamy, like the Mormons and the Old Testament.) A Christian may tell you, for example, that "murder is always wrong," but will ...

The trouble with the belief that God is always "good," as so many Christians and Muslims believe, is that it means that anything God does or has ever done, is simply "good" by definition, because God did it, even if it would be the greatest evil of all when lesser versions of the same thing are done by or for the devil.  So when the Hebrews of the Old Testament brag about committing genocide for God, it's necessarily interpreted as "good," at least in comparison to whatever practice evoked God's righteous call for genocide anyway. But if we say that all of the genocide committed in the 20th century alone was committed by or for the devil, we consider genocide to be the greatest evil of all, even though most of the genocides that occurred in the 20th century were, in many instances, related to Christianity.  When child sacrifice is carried out for Satan worship, Christians call it an abomination, even though Christians worship a God they be...

What if no one had ever heard of Jesus? What if something happened and, over time, the story of Jesus Christ, along with all reference to him and anything to do with Christianity, was eventually and entirely lost from all human memory, and not a single shred of evidence existed anywhere about him, or the Christian God? This is the problem with the idea that we must "believe" in a story of a God-man, who died for our sins and rose again. It is also the problem with all such "stories" that any religion has to offer. It never considers what happens if humanity on the whole exercises as much amnesia about Jesus as it does about everything else.  Think about it. If ALL of the stories of the Bible were suddenly wiped from both human memory and from our entire universe, then there would obviously be no way for anyone to "believe" in a man, or a story, or even our fall and redemption, even though they needed to "believe" such a story to save themselv...