The Rant Institute

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. Translated - "You did nothing, I did it all. Depend upon me the way the drug addict needs a doctor. So no one may boast... but me." For the Joel Osteen's of the world, that "salvation" comes with a mansion and more money than the money changers, who's table Jesus thrashed back in the day, but according to this passage, they shouldn't "boast." And presumably because the mansions and all the luxuries of he enjoys, in his little heaven on earth, not only speaks for itself, but even better, it affords Olsteen the ability to be as far removed from the hell on earth of poverty, that so many of their parishioners both depend upon and help to create, like the rich man was to Lazarus, who was forced to eat the crumbs from his table.     But what's most ironic of all, is how such people can co...

To believe we know the mind of God is to deny that our own mind is only as human as everyone else's. In fact, no one is more godly or moral or holy, simply because they "believe" they are, and no one "becomes" more moral or holy through a "belief" that they are. But there are plenty of examples throughout history that prove the opposite is true. It is believed that the "belief" that morality necessarily comes from God, who wields the divine power to punish us eternally for failing to live up to it, is necessary for making people moral. It never occurs to these "believers" that such a belief is itself the very thing that contributes to most of the "immoral" behavior in the world. It was just this sort of thinking, for example, that lead Columbus to lead the slaughter of millions of Native Americans, for God and gold (which are essentially the same thing, when you think about it), and why the Catholic Church hide it...

The Tree of Knowledge in the bible is said to have been the place where humanity fell from grace, only to be put right with God by hanging his son Jesus from a tree on Golgotha, which is an Aramaic word for "skull." Knowledge, in other words, is what fills the mind, while a skull is empty of any thought whatsoever, for obvious reasons. It is always assumed that by hanging up Christ humanity had redeemed itself for pulling down an apple, but it is more likely the case that the "fruit" from both trees, whether in Eden or on Golgotha, was the same fruit. What if, in other words, the cross is simply the tree of knowledge of good and evil, since that is exactly what Christians claim to have obtained from eating the flesh and drinking the blood - the Fruit of the vine - of Jesus, that Jesus was "the fruit," as it were, and the Serpent selling the promise that, by eating it, "we will become like God, knowing good from evil," has always been the Ch...

Nothing is stronger in human experience than our tribal nature, which is why it is so virtually impossible for people to leave their religion, which amounts to a kind of spiritual racism of the soul. The absolute truth of religion requires it's adherents to be intolerant of accepting any other religions as equal to the one we happen to believe is "the one true faith," which only ensures (since our ever lasting soul depends on defending this proposition, lest we be roasted like hot dogs for ever in hell) that conflict will always be as common to us as breathing. Catholics deny this, of course, insisting instead that the conflicts in the world are the result of "original sin," which is a convenient "sickness" of the soul, so they claim, that can only be washed away by religion, for the most part. That Christianity has used it's "absolute truth" claims to justify the killing of Native Americans, Jews, women, the enslavement and murder o...

One of the more interesting reasons Catholics will offer for why the Protestant Reformation was a spiritual error is that, by allowing people to read the Holy Scriptures for themselves, Martin Luther had made each person a pope of their own interpretation of those scriptures. In truth, however, it is the belief that there is an infallible Pope that convinces Catholics that they're claims are infallible truth, even though not a single Christian agrees completely with any other single Christian in what that "infallible truth" actually is, in every detail. Far from leading to the practice that everyone is their own pope about the truth of God, the ability of people to read the bible for themselves, thanks in large part to that heretic Martin Luther, lead to a greater diversity, and thus a greater understanding of how "truth" is always a collaborative process, not a dictatorial one, anchored in Rome.

Great cathedrals and abbeys are, in more ways than one, ways of worshiping "the cave" that Plato talked about in the Allegory of the Cave, only such "caves," where worshiping a God who lives in the sky is most revered by praying within (ironically enough), are purely man made, and whose inhabitants, transfixed by the the shadows cast on the wall by their "light of truth," worship their own disdain of the "outside world."

The Christian is cock sure that there is a God, named Jesus, who runs the world, according to his divine plan. And in the past, God (or Jesus), used the world's "climate" to murder nearly every living this on the planet he had made, apparently trying to reboot the operating system of a world that started as a garden of Eden, but had apparently gone completely to shit shortly thereafter. This same God, who decided to murder humanity for not finding the wherewithal to overcome the "stain" of original sin He could've removed from their souls (which would've undoubtedly helped humanity escape the watery wrath  of God's disappointment) but fiendishly choose not to, is a "being" for which there is not a single shred of evidence to suggest even exists, except a book that is so drenched in blood, genocide, sin, and hypocrisy, that it makes Mien Kampf look like a Harlequin Romance novel. If you ask the die hard Christian "believer" to ...

The miracle of denial caused by miracles is undeniable.  When a "believer" encounters a "miracle," which is something that they are convinced is always an intervention of God's grace superseding the normal operations of a material universe (leaving the rest of us to wonder why He doesn't do this more often, if it's as easy as simply thinking about it), they see it not as proof of their own ignorance about a seemingly infinitely complex universe, but as undeniable and unequivocal validation of how ingenious they are to hold the particular brand of religious "beliefs" they do (which, by the lottery of luck, they usually have for no other reason than that they happened to have been born into it). That two people of very different Christian faiths can both interpret the same miracle as both a validation of their own particular brand of Christianity and an invalidation of the Christianity held by the other "Christian," never causes eit...

God stuck us all here on this rock called Earth, in which everything is forced to eat everything else to survive, and the best "plan" He could come up with, to teach us all about love and morality, is to have us all brutally murder his own son, in defense of His good name (Christ, after all, was executed as a heretic). God could have come up with any infinite number of NON-VIOLENT ways to redeem humanity, of course, especially considering that the murder of Christ was intended to redeem humanity for petty larceny, but He choose not to. So, ignoring how God's own plan to redeem humanity and forge a new "Covenant" necessarily hinged on the hope that that same humanity would break at least two of the "Commandments" He'd given to Moses, like the prohibitions against lying and murder, "God" (or whoever dreamed up this silly story in the first place) enthroned violence as the necessary catalyst for redemption. And from murdering heretics ...

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil, to one who is striking at the root," said Henry David Thoreau. What he failed to mention, however, is how often the person striking at the root is confused by all those hacking at the branches, for being the root itself.

Only in the paradoxes of our ideas do we find the proofs or the disproofs of our beliefs, and why one person's mystery of faith is another persons self evident contradiction,  even though both equally rely on those same "contradictions" to survive, and often for the same reasons.

"What if there is a God, "the atheist asked the priest, "how could you possibly prove he wasn't a complete lunatic?" And with the gentle puff of his cigar, he concluded, "The Old Testament, after all, reads like it was written by Ted Bundy, Pol Pot, or Joseph Stalin."

The most rabid of Christians, like the most rabid of Muslims, have fallen hopelessly in love with their own minds, and the belief that their own convictions are actually "infallible, universal truths" that come from, and indeed reflect, the will of God Himself - the creator and moral author of the universe. (That such a God famously ignores such "moral" laws, and often commands his "faithful" flocks to do the same, never causes a single "follower" of such "beliefs" to question the blatant contradiction, that atheists forever implore them to consider as the "truest" fruit of their faith, is a miracle of denial that would even make the Devil green with envy.) As such, they look at the world and "know," with absolute certainty, that they are infallibly "right" in all they proclaim about the nature of virtually everything, especially anything in any way related to sex. That they proclaim to be "humbl...

What if you could detonate your identity, and build an entirely new one that looks nothing like the old one, in the same way we bring down a house or a building, and the one we replace it with can look nothing like what was there before?  Both Liberalism and Capitalism sees this as a virtue, each in their respective spheres, as long as what is being built is left to one's own free will, instead of through the imposition of regulations imposed by some governing body, whether in Rome or Washington, while Conservatism and Christianity see this to be as evil as 9/11, and thinks this is only a virtue if what is being built it its place conforms to some tradition or set of proscribed rules and regulations. And this is even more ironic when you consider how much Conservatives hate government but practically worship their Church, and denounce the decisions passed down by the Supreme Court, even though they believe that their religion legitimizes both the existence and power of that cou...

One of the miracles of faith that bedevils nonbelievers about "the faithful," is the latter's unremitting ability to deny the overwhelming amount of horrible "fruit," as their own Bible puts it, of the "tree" they worship. That tree, like the one in the garden of Eden, is the cross, of course. Christians claim that God is steering his "Church" to right action, and everywhere in defense of His moral laws. That all of those laws have been repeatedly broken by His holy "Church" in order to ensure that "the gates of hell shall no prevail," is not only ignored by the faithful, but is always rationalized, not as any kind of evidence for the very nature of the "tree" Christians worship, but only ever as evidence of just how right Christians are to worship such a tree. Consider the example of the Inquisitions. After centuries of ever increasing laws, of every kind imaginable, laid upon the backs of Europeans like a...

Thomas Jefferson once said... "In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty.  He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own." No  wonder the Church sides with the Fascists during the Spanish Revolution and the monarchists and propertied aristocracies during the French Revolution. The Church who's founder was both penniless  and wholly without property - "they threw dice and divided his garments," his only property, while he hung on the cross - has always sided with those who have property agaisnt all those they stole it from.

If you watched the movie, Silence, which tells the story of two 17th century Portuguese Jesuit priests who travel to Japan in an attempt to locate their mentor who is rumored to have committed apostasy, and to propagate Catholicism. But, as a mental experiment, consider what would happen if we did not traverse through time in a forward motion, so that we are unable to see the hurricanes created by our various butterflies until sometime long after we are gone. Could Christ, for example, have ever predicted the countless horrors perpetrated in his name? But if we could instead traverse from those hurricanes back through time, to those moments, and indeed those butterflies, from whence they emanated, would we still see such actions as wise or moral? If the priests  depicted in the movie Silence, who sought only to Christianize China for God, could see the horrible toll their religion would be used to create in the opium trade, when Christian England forced the sale of such a...

It has long been assumed by "believers" that our souls, and thus some level of conciousness, will be freed from the body when we die, and end up in whatever heaven, or hell, we will inhabit forever. But how do we know, if we accept that we have souls that outlive our body, we'd ever esacpe our body when it dies? Maybe, in other words, our spirit is trapped inside of a dead body, and by closing our eyes we have effectively shut all the windows.

We are all trapped inside this tiny little universe, born into a death sentence that we strive in every way imaginable to deny, and by attributing the property of eternity not to death, but "eternal life," by hoping that, after we die, we'll be magically transported to a heaven where we'll never have to go through this hell again.  That the "Creator" who is alleged to have put us all here in the first place, is the very same one we hope will save us from the one by "beaming" us to the other, is a paradox even the mighty minds of Augustine or Aquinas would have in reconciling with their views. And we can expect such a possibility, however tentatively,  for having been so happy to have suffered through a world where everyone and everything must, by its very nature, eventually die.  Some see this reality as the greatest threat to humanity, as if such a perspective would only induce the great majority of people in the world to immediately or even...

C.S. Lewis once argued in favor for his "universal natural law" by claiming that no society ever saw cowardice as a virtue. This may be true, although such a conclusion assumes a knowledge of all societies that is impossible for any human being to grasp, humanity being millions of years old, but it also ignores the fact that every virtue is a vice, when it is too extreme, and how every vice, in moderation, is a virtue, including cowardice, when it is based on having a single foot rooted in the reality of our intellectual limitations and our human mortality. When Bertrand Russell says he would never die for his "beliefs," because he is humble enough to admit he could be wrong, he is exercising a virtuous degree of cowardice in his willingness to go to his grave for propounding an idea that, however it may have possessed the heart and mind like a demon, is nevertheless no more infallible in its understanding of everything - let alone abstractions like "absolu...

In an insane world, the highest forms of rational thought are often seen by the majority to be insane, because they are using their own thinking as the yardstick of what is normal and what is possible. Common sense, in other words, is a psychopathy.

The only thing that limits the seeker of truth is the self-erecting iron bars of their beliefs. And that all of their pain comes from those who do not believe it, or who do but fail to exercise it as it should, and all of their pleasure comes from convincing everyone else they are right. And this, to their mind, is the supreme act of humility.

Of course Pope Leo XIII said that "the best and strongest support for morality is religion," because getting people to believe this is exactly what ensures he maintains his power over people, both politically and spiritually. That's what everyone does, in fact, to ensure that their position and more importantly their power, are continued to be "believed" in by the masses. The good Catholic will naturally insist, of course, that to focus on this "power" is to miss the point that "religion is indeed the best and strongest support for morality!," and that that's not only plainly obvious (even if to no one but the "true believer"), but what really matters. Whatever power a pope may derive from their position, Catholics will further argue, only adds to his responsibility, and for which he will be held accountable to God. If you point out this there is absolutely no evidence anywhere that can be used to substantiate s...

When you question a persons beliefs, you are asking them to question what they see in the mirror.