The Rant Institute

Often times, the only real difference between the Christian Conservative and the Liberal Atheist is a single word.  The Christian Conservative, for example, is only as anti-government as the atheist is anti-God, or more specifically, anti-religion. The former does not want the man made institution of "government" imposing its rules and regulations on them, anymore than the latter wants the man made institution of "religion," or a man made "God, doing the same thing.  Hence, the only difference between the two is which "man made institution" is depriving them of their "liberty" or "freedom." The Conservative thinks (at least politically) in terms of the former, of course, while the Liberal thinks in terms of the latter. And even though it is often forcefully argued that the two are wildly different (which is largely a matter of semantics) they are fundamentally the same.  It is precisely this difference in words - gover...

The nature of the difference between Liberals and Conservatives often comes down to how the two interpret ideas and the world at large. The paragraph that follows, written by by Dr Adrian Rogers, provides an opportunity to illustrate that difference. It was posted on a ultra-right Conservative  Facebook page as a "profound little paragraph" about why Conservatives think Socialists and Liberals are crazy or stupid or both. But if we go through it, sentence by sentence, we can see how a Liberal could have written the very same paragraph yet intended something very different. It is an example, in other words, of two people looking at the same thing but seeing two very different things, thanks to the different bias they use to interpret it. Here is the paragraph: You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy our of freedom What one persons receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to any...

In the Art of War, Sun Tzu counseled that we must "be like water," and course down a mountain side not by fighting agaisnt the rocks and obstacles we encounter, but by fluidly finding the path of least resistance. This idea was embodied in the old religions of paganism and Zoroastrianism, for example, and was the general essence of polytheistic beliefs that simply incorporated new gods and ideas into their theologies. But then came Christianity, which was not the first monotheistic religion to grow out of the stories of a man who had become a god thru his death and resurrection, but it was the first one designed to exert a spiritual elitism through the branding of exclusivity and infallibility. Those who sought to join the gold standard of religions, which Christianity had become when the Emperor Constantine established it as the official religion of Rome (which he did after he had a dream that by the cross he would win his great military victory - proving once again that...

To the Sanhedrin, Christ was the serpent in the garden, as was every heretic to every other religion that promises paradise in exchange for submission to a "god," a religion, and authority, as well as acceptance and conformity to old  "beliefs" and ways of thinking. Knowledge, especially new knowledge and new perspectives,  has thus always been greeted by those devoted religiously to a veneration of past ideas, as a heresy of liberalism that threatens to destroy the garden of society that rests so precariously upon the willingness of people not to question or rock the boat; and always by those who, from Socrates to Jesus, challenge the old gods through a new way of thinking. And this is just as true today as it has been with every generation and in every epoch. Religions and nations alike, then, have built their reputations by enshrining this willingness as the mark of divinity, built as it were on the fear that radical new ideas would sink society into cha...

Conservatives often argue that Liberals are controlled by their emotions, as if God calls humanity to improve itself by necessarily becoming as emotionless as those Christians who decided to torture and mutilate all those who disagreed with them during the middle ages, or drop atom bombs on Japan and implement the "final solution" in Germany. But according to research in the neurosciences, the very opposite is true.  Such a claim by both Conservatives and Christians are not only incredibly ironic, since both subscribe to their "beliefs" for wholly emotional reasons despite the facts and the evidence, but likewise evinces an unfounded worship of  what it means to "be a man." According to such a myopic and paradoxical perspective, men are thought to be "strong" specifically because they can be as Machiavellian as John Wayne or General Custer in massacring anyone from native Americans to Vietcong to Muslims when necessary, by elevating the cold,...

The narcissism of Christianity is the cornerstone upon which the global consumerist culture was built. Upon that cornerstone humanity sacrifices itself as a burnt offering to fame, fortune, power, and luxury, and all under the sheepskin of an image of itself, cast in the guise of a humble Shepard.  Nothing could be more narcissistic than the idea that the most powerful being imaginable cares more about you specifically than virtually every other thing in the universe. Religions try to temper the extreme sense of self importance they peddle to their willing customers, in this respect, with the "belief" that a 'god' cares equally as much about every other human being (if nothing else), even though that 'god' has created an eternal hell into which he intends to throw all those who are too proud to accept such humility. Consumerism, building upon the ethos of narcissism peddled by religions, sells its customers the very same sense of love and heaven those...

Conservatives have always had a rather odd and contradictory perspective on war and sex, assuming that it is simply "human nature" to engage in one every bit as much as the other. But isn't this simply a self fulfilling prophecy on the one hand, especially with regard to war, and a capitulation to our savagery on the other? If like the poor, to put it more plainly, war is something we will always have with us, should human progress then be defined as simply the accumulation of toys, luxuries, power and wealth?  On war, Conservatives feel it is something we will always have with us, and as such, we should therefore take measures to prepare for it. And by doing so, perhaps avert or reduce the likelihood  or frequency with which we will have to engage in it at all.  As much as we would like to avoid it, in other words, was is a fact of life that we should accept and prepare for. (That wars have only proliferated with the ever greater sales of weapons, never deters t...

I have never understood how King Herod could be considered such a monster for engaging in the slaughter of the first born son of so many thousands of Jews in his day, and all out of a fear of loosing his power to a new born king, while a God  who engaged in the exact same thing to the Egyptians during Passover is so continually worshiped as benevolent and merciful. After all, even if the whole point of Passover was to change Pharaoh's heart and convince him to let God's people go, why did God feel the need to murder all of the other children in Egypt at that time? Why didn't God just take Pharaoh's first born son, in other words, or just transport him to hell while he slept, since doing so would've likely convinced him, much as it had convinced the rich man who was too cheap to give anything to Lazarus,  of the error of his ways? It has been said that God did as much with some saints, which seems like a giant waste of time if they were already saints, but refrai...

We have the bias of only ever seeing history through the lens of how events played out. We look at the American Revolution and subsequent Civil War, for example, blinded by a bias that things played out according to God's divine plan, even though both conflicts were fought for largely the same reasons, yet with opposite conclusions. For the Southern states that sought to free themselves from the tyranny of a monarchical Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War was no different than colonialists attempts to free themselves from the tyranny of old King George. Yet the Christian sees the conclusion of both of these conflicts as conforming to some moral plan designed by God, even though victory in the Revolution allowed wealthy colonialists to maintain the very same system of slavery the Southern States were fighting to preserve in the Civil War. As such, the Southern States believed just as vehemently as the Northern States that "God" was 100% on their side of the conflict, for an...

The atheist is often left to wonder why Christians seem to universally deny that any of the evils committed by Christians in the name of Christianity, or for God more directly, have anything to do with "real" Christianity. And they very much do the same thing with anything yoked to their Christianity as well, which in America means capitalism. When the Nazis murder Jews by the millions, such genocidal acts are always seen by Christians as "the fruit of the tree" of Nazism, even though Hitler and the Nazi's were either Christian, or couched all of their antisemitism and justification for genocide of the Jews, on the Christian bible.  When Stalin murdered millions to advance his own totalitarian brand of "communism," which was as far afoul of Karl Marx's ideas of communism as it was of the communism of the Christ's original twelve disciples or the Inquisitions were afoul of the teachings of Christ, Christians almost universally argue that suc...

A Christian telling an atheist to prove there is no God is like an atheist telling a Catholic to prove that the anti-Catholic propaganda that was written in 1836 by Maria Monk called The Awful Disclosures, which told of lurid tales of sexual depravity among Catholic priests and nuns, is in fact untrue. After all, the Catholic requirement that atheist must prove God does not exist, even though it is impossible to prove a negative, is no different from atheist's requiring Catholics to prove that they are not simply dupes who, however sincere they may be, are simply working unwittingly for their own devil.  In her book, Monk tells about the horribly painful penances she was forced to perform, which included sticking pins through her cheeks. She likewise details how, after taking her final vows to become a nun, she was told  by her superiors that she must have sex with the priests, and that in fact the convent was actually a brothel and the nuns were entirely at the lascivious d...

A paradigm is like a planet, in that only external forces can cause it to turn.

If you look around the world today, and not just into those corners of it that we prefer to see, but actually paying attention to the homeless people around the world, that we all knowingly ignore like the "bums" we pass on the street, it's impossible to claim that reality is anything but a tragedy, all in all. That we have moments in our lives that fill us with rapture, love, and joy, does not change the fact that we enjoy these experiences, which convince us that life is a gift, while there are so many countless others of us around the world for whom life feels like nothing but a curse. To escape that reality, one where we experience so many fleeting mini-heavens of bliss on earth while others feel like they're roasting alive in a permanent hell, we "believe" that it's all out of our hands, and there's just nothing we can do about any of it. So we defer to God, most of all, insisting it's all somehow part of his divine plan, while believing...

Christianity often charges atheists with only worshiping themselves, and humanity at large. But the truth is that it is Christianity that only worships "man," and altogether rejects anything that could be considered an immaterial "God." This is not only true in the sense that it is religion that elevates human beings as the central and indeed only important creature in the story of existence, but also in the sense that history and power has always rested in the hands of men; and this is especially true regarding the power of religion. Christians, in other words, only worship a glorified image of themselves, one that amounts to an infinitely perfected image of humans in the heavens, that they fall in love with like Narcissus, and are willing to die for in a fit of narcissism. And they do this with an "infallible" certainty that their "beliefs" constitute universal, immutable, undeniable, "truth," even as they defend their belief in suc...

One of the fascinating aspects of our modern world is the belief that "private vices will produce public virtues." This belief, expressed by Dutch philosopher Bernard Mandiville  in 1705, in his book The Fable of the Bees: or Private Vices, Public Benefits , described, in short, “how both the merchant and the con man were driven by selfish instincts.” For Mandeville , it was vice, not virtue, that kept the wheels of commerce turning. Mandeville   even captured those sentiments in a poem Thus Vice nurs'd Ingenuity, Which join'd with Time and Industry, Had carry'd Life's Conveniences, It's real Pleasures, Comforts, Ease, To such a Height, the very Poor Liv'd better than the Rich before, And nothing could be added more. Upon this maxim has been built the modern global economy, as well as our modern technological financial systems. But such an idea is rife with implications that reverberate across the world in numerous ways, most if not ...

People who believe that religion is needed to keep people's passions in check, never consider just how often such an idea only leads to creating a monster within. How so? Like Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's, Psycho, we internalize our ideals about morality, and by doing so, we elevate them to the level of what we perceive to be "divine," which has the simultaneous effect of lowering those behaviors that are the corollary opposite to being necessarily "evil." Like pales of water tied to a single rope, where lowering one raises the other, so to by prizing "virginity" as something as sacred as the Virgin Mother, we simultaneously lower "sex" itself to something that, by comparison, is only the more defiled. Of course, religions take no responsibility for this, assuming as they do that we can always keep the inner Mr. Hyde in check by focusing purely on the ideas and habits of Dr. Jekyll, even though the whole point of Robert Louis ...

G.K. Chesterton is that kind of Catholic who Catholics like to quote in defense of their Catholicism  more often than even the Bible. But it never seems to occur to those who do, just how much atheists agree with some of the things Chesterton wrote, but just not in the same way he meant it. For example, he once wrote: "A Catholic is a person who has plucked up courage to face the incredible and inconceivable idea that something else may be wiser than he is." For any good Catholic who reads this, this statement is interpreted as a compliment. It congratulates the Catholic, basically, for having the good sense to know "that something else may be wiser than he is," and all because he has the "courage" to admit such a "thing" exists; and that thing can only be God, and the Catholic brand of God at that - one that happens to always hate all of the same things that we do.  The Catholic denies that the very "thing" Chesterton is r...

It has often been claimed that Christianity has helped to advance human understanding in all areas of knowledge, but this is a demonstrable falsehood, that only proves how often Christianity practices the very opposite of what it so proudly and loudly claims; and always in the name of humility. Where Christianity has often gotten it wrong, it killed or silenced all those who got it right, until such time as the Church had changed its mind; and then proclaimed to be the first ones to have discovered such "infallible truth" to begin with. Christianity opposed ideas that the earth revolved around the sun, for example. Christianity also opposed the idea that slavery and later segregation were immoral; that minorities,women and the poor all deserved the right to vote as much as land owning white men;and  that evolution was a more valid theory of the origins of human development than "creationism" or what would later be recast as "intelligent design." It has...

In Vietnam, the lack of any clear objective allowed the savagery of war to devolve to the point that the only thing that mattered was the body count. Such savagery, performed by those who saw no discernible point to it, was clearly one of the great vices of America's "war" in Vietnam, regardless of how one looks at that war. Today, the war on drugs, like the war on terror, likewise has no discernible objective or goal, and least of all to those who, often out of a misplaced sense of patriotism or sense of duty, or in an attempt to simply escape the plight of their own poverty, are sent to fight it.   But the difference is that, while simply focusing on the body count was seen as only contributing to the horrors of the mistake in Vietnam, and thus a vice, today, the body count is seen as not only a virtue, but as the only discernible objective in the war on drugs and on terror. And in this way, the body count was transformed from a vice into a virtue.

Den Fujita , the wealthy Japanese founder of MacDonald's Japan, once said "If we eat McDonald's hamburgers and potatoes for a thousand years we will become taller, our skin become white, and our hair blonde." What's interesting is that all of the children in China knew the face of Ronald MacDonald, by the 1980's, claiming they  "liked Uncle MacDonald, because he was gentle, kind, and understood children's hearts." And this just shows how Ronald MacDonald can be presented as a Jesus Christ, who's body is a hamburger and who's blood is coca-cola, and with a side of fries, this trinity of deliciousness is transformed into "the bread of life," and used to seduce children into eating it, by a guy dressed up like John Wayne Gacy.  

A person should never be afraid to make up a word, or capture an idea in a term of art, for in both instances we give a voice to the myriad voiceless nuances we swim  in. For creating new words is like adding new colors to life, it is to design an idea that can be shared with the world with the ease of a whisper, and the power to change all of human history. If we had never made a single new word, we could never have defined "genocide,"  which wasn't invented until 1944 when Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer, coined the term by combining the rooted words genos (Greek for family tribe or race) and -cide (Latin for killing). And that's why the need to preserve languages is so important, because with the death of every language, is a little piece of an understanding of ourselves that no one else has; which is a kind of "nous-cide" ("nous" being Greek for mind or source of spiritual perception). .

If the Bible is true God, is a spoiled rotten child addicted to the video game Grand Theft Auto, but also the serial killer Jigsaw in the movie Saw. And the world is not only that same video game, but is the elaborate yet macabre contraption designed to force all those who are born into it's hellish embrace, to appreciate their life through the fear and anguish that comes from being alive. The only difference, of course, is that in the movie Saw, people at least had the chance of escaping with their life, while in this world, no one gets out alive, and some can only expect to be born into a far greater hell than the one they were dying to get out of.

Once St. Augustine had succeeded in slaking his lust for the prostitutes of Rome, he demonized women and sex to a degree that far surpassed anything the Catholic Church had ever concerned itself with, at least up until that point. Augustine, in other words, was as fanatic a voice for the oppression and vilification of women and sex in his own time, as the Taliban or ISIS are today, even though the Catholic Church had never taken such an extremist view of either one during the days of St. Augustine. Today, the Catholic Church largely bases its entire understanding, which is as medieval an understanding about sexuality as geo-centrism was of our solar system, on the writings of  men like St. Augustine, who not only seemed to take more pleasure in excoriating women than the Marquee de Sade, but who likewise enjoyed and lauded the use of torture to convert people to his own virulent brand of Catholicism, which was as steeped in its fear of women and hatred of human flesh as was all...