The Rant Institute

We think we are scientists discovering truth when we are really just lawyers who are arguing for positions we arrived at by other means, wrote Jonathan Haidt, and if you doubt this, he continued, just look around and realize we think this is the case with everyone else, and everyone else thinks the same thing of us. We are NOT primarily rational beings, is the point Haidt is making, despite the attempt by theologians to addict people to the logical porn of philosophy while condemning all those who prefer sex to sophistry. Sex, in fact, is no less an addiction to the same endorphins released in our brains from arguing we are "right" about something, whether that something is God, our political positions, the superiority of our sports team, whether our pessimism is more warranted than optimism, and virtually everything else. God, in this respect, is an idea that addicts us to our own endorphins as much as any video game or gambling addiction (which Pascal's wager capita...

Humans who believe they will live forever after they die live in denial of their place in the universe, elevating themselves to an importance and power that is even greater than the entire universe itself. That is to say, although humans are convinced they know enough about the universe to confidently claim the universe itself has a beginning and an end (yeah, there's no hubris in such an assumption), they are likewise convinced that they will live forever, in a state of either pain or pleasure, and all because they simply "believe" they will. And in this assumption, humans elevate themselves to the status of a god, even as they condemn the "devil" for committing the greatest sin of all by daring to try and do the same thing. And worse still, all those who insist they will "live forever" claim they are only ever being the most "humble" by making such a claim. In short, the belief in salvation turns every vice into a virtue, which is why...

How in the hell is it that "man," which is a material being, beleives he is "made" in the image and likeness of a "God" that said "man" insists is an altogether immaterial being? Is a tree made in the image of an immaterial archetype of a tree? Are not archetypes themselves wholly man made cognitive concepts, which we then project into the mind of a divine intelligence, that we simply assume shares all of the same concepts of beauty, proportion, logic, morality, etc, as ourselves, but only with an infinitly perfected sense of such things, that we can only hope to gleam (if we are good, for goodness sake) upon the death of the material meat prison we are all born into called our human body? That humanity stands today armed with ever increasing evidence, and from every field of study, of just how stupendously wrong we have been about virtually everything we have ever known, or thought we knew, or "believed" we knew, does not for a s...

Americans are addicted to opioids because America is addicted to capitalism. Or to put it another way, our drug addiction is a result of our gambling addiction.  And both of these addictions are the result of our addiction to achieving "perfection," whether spiritually through our "beliefs" about what it means to be a "perfect" child of God, exemplified in our quest to be ever more like Jesus (I.e. a quest to, like the devil, be like god), or physically through Botox, drugs, and plastic surgery. And addiction, after all, is a disease. Our quest for perfection is not only the source of our divisions, however, but likewise our greatest source of shame, while our flaws are often what unite us the most, because they prove that we are all only human.

It has been said that if the God of the Bible existed, it would be the most horrible thing we could ever imagine.  That's certainly what one discovers from reading the Bible! Hell, just look at what he did to his own son, what he did to the world overall with a flood, to countless other of his "children" through plagues and famines, and even his own "chosen people" during their exodus from the Pharaohs of Egypt! I mean, can anyone really blame them, after being lead around the desert to die for forty years, for losing faith!? And for all those who did, Moses slaughtered them mercilesslely at yaweh's behest. Hell, just think about the prospect of having created an eternal "hell" in the first place, whatever it may be. In truth, the god of the Bible most likely murdered all of the other gods like a Stalin or an Al Capone, just to rule the universe so he could torture all those who dared to tell the truth about just how much of a monster he real...

If one reads of the "intransigence" of the Pharaohs when dealing with "God"s people," and the Pharaohs unwillingness to ever consider a different point of view from his own, it is one of the great miracles of faith that this "intransigence" is condemned by Christians as the greatest vice, even as the same Christians far exceed such "intransigence" as their own greatest virtue. If a Pharaoh refuses to change his mind, in other words, it's a sin, but when the Christian is even more obstinate in their refusal to change their mind, despite overwhelming evidence, even to the point that they are willing to die before they would ever consider their "beliefs" are only as human as they are,  the Christian counts such adamant obstinacy as the highest virtue and proof of their "faith." That the Christian has no evidence for their "beliefs" but pure emotion, buttressed by reasoning grounded in a bloody book called t...

Psychiatry is doing to the human mind what Capitalism itself is doing to the whole world. While the latter addicts people to products they don't need, destroying the complex biodiversity of the environment that the capitalist neither understands nor seems very much to care about, in ways that are only leading to ecocide, so big pharma is doing the exact same thing with our minds, addicting people to drugs they don't need while disrupting the hyper complex system of the human mind - which is as much matter as it is pure thought and emotion - in ways that only lead more and more people to suicide. Our hubris about our own intelligence only puts every god or devil to shame.   

If you saw the HBO series, True Detective, you saw a show about a family of satanic worshiping Christian pastors engaged in raping and murdering children. It just so happens the story was largely true to a case that happened in Louisiana about ten years ago. In the following video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5JkBs4lJak A pastor confessed to engaging in satanic worship in the upstairs of his church, when he and others engaged in child sacrifice and drank the child's blood. It is these kinds of stories that scare "Christians" into "believing" in the Devil, and out of that fear, turning for protection to a "belief" in a "father-figure" in Heaven. It just never occurs to such Christians that the only people who would ever do such a thing are no more delusional in their beliefs than Christians, who not only engage in the commemoration of the very same sort of act every Sunday by reenacting it (with Catholics believing they are drinki...

The only thing Christian about America is that we crucified 20 million natives to take their land and divide it up like the Roman soldiers divided up Jesus's garment at the foot of the cross, and helped ourselves to enslaving 12 million Africans because the Bible said we could. And "the Bible said we could" trumps "the devil made me do it" every time.

I and other atheists spend a great deal of time trying to explain why Christianity (and Islam) are simply the devils way of retarding all human understanding through religion. And Christians spend a great deal of time defending their "right" to believe whatever the hell they want - so help them God! First, atheists must accept that the Christian is absolutely correct in that they indeed have the right to believe whatever the hell they want. That right is the very heart of liberty, after all. But this is the problem for Christianity, because Christians simply refuse to accept anything that resembles "truth" that happens to contradict their sacred "beliefs," even to the point that they believe it is the highest virtue of all to die as a martyr rather than admit that there could be a difference between the two. Hence, the trouble with Christianity is that it seeks only to impose its "beliefs" as the "truth," no matter what anyone els...

The reason I HATE some Catholic priests (some are great, however) is because they either deliberately and knowingly LIE to convince people that their "beliefs" are "true," or they simply refuse to admit that they are presenting their "flock" with biased and highly questionable reasoning and interpretation of evidence, which is often either the simplest of all possible explanations or is simply dead wrong. So even as they claim to ONLY ever be pursuing "truth," they make a mockery of the entire enterprise, just to save their job. Take the example of Fr. Robert Barron. I just watched a clip on Word On Fire with Fr Robert Barron. Don't get me wrong, Fr. Barron is a likeable, affable, intelligent Catholic priest who follows his vocation perhaps to a fault, and all to convince the world, or maybe just himself, that science cannot prove, nor should it ever try to prove, that God does not exist. The problem, as Barron sees it, is that science...

Europeans have conquered every neighboring country in the world over the last several thousand years, due to having little or nothing of raw materials of their own with which to build wealth. From Alexander the Great to Christopher Columbus, the superior "intelligence" and genetics, or what could be called "beliefs" and biology" of Europeans, has only ever been exported to the world through the commodities of  power and enslavement. The "white race" has not only concocted science based lies about its own biological superiority, it has likewise concocted religious based lies about its own spiritual superiority as well, which it has demonstrated to the world with more brutality and death than any army of demons could have dared to dream.  And now that we have thoroughly destroyed the oceans and every other species, enslaved and slaughtered each other for the superiority of our religious, scientific, economic and political beliefs,and convinced ourse...

It never occurs to people what the "original sin" was, exactly, in the garden of Eden. They simply assume it must have been the disobedience of Adam and Eve. Only it wasn't. The original sin is gold, or what we refer to as "money." This is why Cortez told the natives of South America he was suffering from a disease that could only be cured by gold. His "disease" was the very same as King David: greed, and the quest for power. Christianity, then, has always only ever been the means of convincing millions of others to help the cleverest and most ruthless of us all, to get that power, by convincing the masses that they are all "on a mission from God." And human sacrifice has only ever been about keeping that control. Because people never follow beliefs, they only follow feelings, which is why god is both the ultimate source of love, and thanks to hell, the ultimate source of fear. Christians then, are simply "stuck on a feeling...

Most Christians think that Jesus being crucified amounted to the murder of God.  And maybe that's true, but just not in the way they think. Christians insist that God became man, rather than the fact that man turned "God" into an image of himself, and in so doing, murdered "God" by reducing such an abstraction to the lowly limitations of a man. We do not respect the son, or the earth, or the streams from which we crawled out of. We do not respect the seasons, walling ourselves off in heated and air conditioned houses.We do not respect the rain, covering ourselves to keep from getting wet. We do not respect the food we eat, which gives us life, all of which is tainted which chemicals of every variety and imprisoned and slaughtered without a second thought. We are not guilty of the murder of God because Jesus was nailed to a cross, we are guilty of murdering God by murdering each other for a "god" we created in our own image - an image, we tell o...

The true believer never doubts that their belief is alone the best evidence of thing they believe, even though, for the most part, it is really the only evidence they have. But this is no different than a child's beliefs in tooth fairies, Santa Clause, or even that adults in general have any idea what they are doing or talking about. That the child discovers with age the equal falsity of the latter three does not dissuade them from a belief in God, however, even though their "belief" in said "God" came from those same adults who had lied to the child about practically everything else. In addition to this inability to accept that we have simply been duped on every level, and by everyone from our parents to our priests to our politicians and school teachers, is our inability to accept that we are likewise only lying to ourselves in our desire to "believe" in one god or another, from economics to politics to religion to power to fame and fortune. So...

The truth of humanity is not something the vast majority of humans are willing to accept, let alone even consider. To deny that truth, we therefore create mythologies that glorify us as the sole concern of the gods, and religions that demand their "beliefs" are the only real "truth,"  and anyone who denies this will not only be killed as a heretic, but can expect to spend eternity in a "hell" that makes the Texas Chainsaw Massacre look like the Mickey Mouse Club. Civilization is largely a sheepskin, in this sense, whose wool is pulled over our eyes, to hide the fact that man is not merely a wolf to man, but to every other thing on the planet, and even the planet itself. Imagine you had an apple, for example, and upon that apple you saw growing spots and blemishes that crusted over the skin of the apple. From this, you would probably conclude that the apple is rotting. Now imagine you are a "god," or some "being" that is much large...

If you have ever seen the movie, Conspiracy, about the Wannsee Conference where high ranking Nazi and German officials, many of whom were Christians, met to discuss "the final solution of the Jewish question," and Margin Call, about the financial meltdown of 2008, you may notice that the movies are about basically the very same thing. White men (mostly, although Demi Moore is present in Margin Call, but she is white), sitting around a table, discussing who they are willing to sacrifice in order to triumph. True, one is talking about the Jews and the other is talking about money, but it is precisely this difference in the language we use to describe our conventions - for both the term "Jew" and the term "money" are mere human conventions, for the most part - that allows the second one to result in a far greater loss of life, and without a single person going to jail for it. In another sense, both are simply making soylent green. And if you've ever...