The Rant Institute

The Christian is found of accusing atheists and humanists of worshiping man, even though it is the Christian who worship man as their true "god." We see this in the fact that Christians everywhere so often crowd into man made temples around the world, and marvel at those great man-made architectures as if they were actually visiting God's house - if God had wanted a house built by human hands, that is.   The Christian gets around the fact that their sacred books are all man made, by claiming it was God who prompted men to write those books in the first place. Ask them how they know it wasn't the devil in disguise who tricked all those men into writing all of those books, and they will look at you as if to say they are quite sure they are smarter than the devil, and that if the devil had ever written a book - it's questionable to them if the devil even knows how to write at all - they would surely have no trouble determining which books they were, and which we...

The Christian craves death more than anything in the world, for only in death can they come to know the God they spend their whole life only dreaming of. To the Christian, after all, God is the greatest celebrity the world has ever known, and their desire to meet so great a star surpasses all other desires combined. This is why Christianity has so often been referred to as a Cult of Death, a fanged wolf masquerading as the Lamb of Life. The images used by Christianity are telling, in this respect. The cross, for example, is a dead tree, fashioned as a torture device by human hands, and upon which is executed a god in the form of a man. The Church that has reigned for the last two thousand years in the name of that heretic, has wrapped itself around the world, claiming that the blood of that heretic will give those who drink it, eternal life. This same church declares to know, "like God, good from evil," which is exactly what the serpent promised to all those who ate of the ...

One of the most striking coincidences of God is how "he" is understood in entirely purely human form, with even the "he" exhibiting a gender that not only implies the existence of both a physical body as well as a the existence of a "she" - hence, calling 'God" a he is to implicitly deny monotheism -  but which is a qualification we never give to any other ideals, or source of energy like light, gravity, wind, etc. This universal willingness to assume that, if indeed any "god" exists at all, that "he" must exist in a way that all human beings can relate to, even if that God is infinity superior to us in every way, is the basis for all religions that "believe" in one god or another. It would surely be impossible to create a religion that worshiped a God that everyone thought was impossible to relate to, which would be like creating a religion to a frying pan.  What's more, by being "infinite," we are ad...

There is no limit to the amount of suffering in the world, despite our continual attempts to assure ourselves that life is a wonderful bounty of gifts for which we should all be eternally grateful.  Indeed, some people are only grateful for the fact that life is temporary, a purgatory among the stars from which one escapes through the door of a coffin. And this is the case in part because, with every desire comes a concomitant amount of suffering that is both proportional and inseparable from the desire itself. The desire for heaven and God, for example, can not be separated from the concomitant suffering that comes from not having obtained such things already, the way hunger is a suffering for food one has yet to acquire or consume.  This is our perennial paradox, for our desires seduce us with the hope of attainment on the one hand, while simultaneously punishing us with desires unfulfilled. Desire, in short, is always both a carrot and a stick, which is why the Buddhis...

We live in a curious world. It's a world where you're not supposed to be depressed about anything, apparently, even if your chihuahua was just flattened by a cement mixer on your way to your best friends funeral, two days after you were diagnosed with a rare form of cancer that will result in your testicles exploding in three weeks.    The solution to this is drugs or God, both of which prey upon the same chemical endorphins in our mind to "save" us from feeling so low, until we become hooked like junkies. There's all kinds of God junkies running around, of course, they're just applauded for it. Like so many drugs today, the Bible or ideas of "God" and eternal paradise, are all things we use to cheer us up about just how miserable the world really is, and how much we really believe death sucks.  Sure, we've all contributed in one way or another to making the world the steamy pile of shih tzu droppings we have to eat for breakfast every m...

Jesus is called "Christ," because he is believed to be enlightened. But is this "enlightenment" something that can simply be handed on, or is it something that one can only find on their own?  The difference between a shaman and a priest, as Alan Watts has pointed out, is that a priest "receives his ordination from his superiors; he receives something from a tradition that is handed down. A shaman doesn't." The shaman receives his "enlightenment" by "going off into the forest by himself."   So when we think about whether Christ was a shaman or a priest, it would take some serious historical revisionism to suggest that a man who fasted in a desert for forty days, who challenged and reinterpreted his own sacred scriptures, and balked as much at the dogmas of his own day as the institutional authorities who declared them, and who was ultimately put to death by those authorities for having done so, was in anyway a "priest....

We are the navel of the world, the axis point from which each of us experiences the universe. Yet no two experiences of that universe are ever the same. This is not only true of each and every single human being who has ever lived, but of every living thing one can imagine, from the atom to the amoeba to the Andromeda galaxy and beyond. In this respect, each living thing experiences a universe unto themselves, including the universe itself, and through this conglomeration of reality tunnels, a single universe contains an infinite multiverse of vastly different experiences. And in this way, the fabric of reality is woven together from an endless loom of contending interpretations.   From each of our positions as the focal point of such an experience, each of us falls through time and space, clawing frantically all the while with our mind to grasp some permanence that we can cling too. The experience of life itself became so precious to us, from the air in our lungs to the thoug...

A simple way to think about religion is that it is a camp fire. And the "believer" wants only to warm themselves by that fire, and depend upon it to protect them from anything that lurks in the darkness beyond.  The rebel is the one who lights a torch from that fire and ventures forth, not with an intention to burn everything that causes them the least amount of fear in their journey, but to illuminate all that exists in the world, so they may learn from it. For it is only by learning from everything, that we can ever begin to know ourselves.  For only when we are fully willingly to accept who we are, are we able to change and become whatever we wish. But to do that, we must first have the courage to leave the camp fire, for even though it warms us with its heat, its glow blinds us to everything there is to see - until all we can see is the campfire itself. 

Christianity declares that we are all born sinners, so it can convince us all to be wholly dependent upon God to cure us of this condition. But that "God" will only cure us, not through any effort of our own, but through his grace, which he bestows sparingly upon those he alone determines to be "worthy." And while he sets out some guidelines for how he makes his selection, the only thing the Bible assures us all with absolute certainty is that salvation is never guaranteed for anyone. Of course, in this life, it is not God at all who assures us of any of this, but only his Holy Catholic Church, or any of the 40+ thousand Christian derivatives, that all make a great deal of money while here on earth, helping wayward frightened souls reach the heaven they can only hope for. It is a curious thing indeed, then, that such religions claim that only by "believing" in what it is they are telling you, can anyone expect to protect themselves - at least as f...

All of human history has been a war between human knowledge and ignorance, with each side claiming to be the 'true' path to the former and the other to be the repository of the latter. Religion labors to convince humanity that it alone offers "true" knowledge - as much about the meaning of life and our own soul as God and the afterlife - with science being but a serpent selling sublime ignorance clothed as the fruit of knowledge. And it is only through the selling of such ideas, which are always advertised as the only insurance agaisnt roasting alive for all eternity, that  power reigns through ignorance that it everywhere declares to be "infallible truth." In daring to shed our fears and superstitions in the innocent pursuit of our curiosity, religion condemns us as depraved sinners who had offended our Creator's divine decree that we should remain forever his slave, through the exclusive worship and adoration of the triumphant stupidity of faith. ...

I am fascinated by serial killers. This is mostly because I cannot help but wonder how much they may be simply reflections of our society in general. In the same way "believers" like to imagine they are made in the image and likeness of a benevolent God,  in other words, I wonder if serial killers are really made in the true image and likeness of ourselves and our society. By the time we reach the age 18, for example, American children will have seen 16,000 simulated murders and 200,000 acts of violence, according to a 1998 study done by American Psychiatric Association. This does not include the amount of violence found in video games, by the way, which increasingly blur the line between what is virtual and what is real. Along those same lines, then, the APA also noted that “many younger children cannot discriminate between what they see (on television) and what is real."  And if you wander into any given Church on Sunday, you'll see throngs of highly educat...

Human history has a heartbeat.     It has a rhythmic pulse that is both systolic and diastolic, as it contracts when power concentrates in the hands of the few, and expands as that power is eventually disseminated back among the many.  The contest for the single human soul shared equally by every human being, then, has only ever been waged between these two forces, between those few who seek the power to control the many, and always with claims of necessity, benevolence, and divine right, and the many who have repeatedly challenged those who have always enriched themselves by convincing the many to accept the legitimacy of such claims, in either religious or political terms. For most of that history, religion has largely been used as a means of concentrating power in the hands of the few to control the many, not only by offering and then legitimizing hierarchically ordered paradigms, but by working everywhere to convince people that those paradigms reflec...

If one watches the trial of O. J. Simpson, they notice how much it revolved around, not an objective interpretation of the evidence, but pure human emotions and biases, and any number of social, economic, racial, political, and cultural issues. And in a sense, is that case not very much like the case agaisnt God?  The atheist is the prosecution, in this sense, accusing the Christian God of having murdered countless numbers of people with famine, plagues, and a notorious worldwide flood. Even worse than that, if we are to accept the Christian claim that the Bible is the word of God, then it is also God's confession for having ordered his "chosen people" in the Old Testament, to commit multiple acts of murder and genocide, over and over again.  In fact, just consider how God really feels about abortion from the following passages: “ And now go, and thou shalt smite Amalec and Hierim and all that belongs to him, and thou shalt not save anything of him aliv...

How is it that people like David Koresch, or Jim Jones, or saints and popes, and even Mother Theresa, can all hook people into believing what they are selling? Easy: they hook people on the drug of their own desires. But any desire to fulfill one's desires - including and perhaps especially the desire to fulfill a desire "that nothing in this world can possibly satisfy" - is simply an outright rejection of a willingness to "die to self." ISIS, the Taliban, and Al Qaeda, fill their ranks with willing "believers" and even terrorists the same way, with war, misery, and abject poverty only helping to increase that desire by robbing people of the most basic of life's necessities, including any hope for a better future (at least here on earth).  But from the Catholic Church to the cults of Charlie Manson and David Koresch, people's addiction to always wanting "more" is not only the drug that hooks consumers to the need for ever mor...

Science adjusts its views based on what is observed, wrote Tim Minchin, while "faith is the denial of observation, so that a belief can be preserved."  Consider what happens when faith is used as the horse that drags the cart of science around behind it. If we use religion as our basis for understanding things, and science only for discovering things but not their meanings, then any discovery of chemical imbalances in the human brain would lead Christians, not to the conclusion that they are wrong to see the mentally handicapped as witches in league with Lucifer, but quite the very opposite.  On the contrary, those Christians would find that such imbalances were caused by, and thus the surest proof of, that person's willingness to sell their soul to the devil, so they could enjoy all of the dark benefits of becoming a witch. The chemical imbalances, then, would simply be the byproduct of a corrupted or altogether absent soul. In fact, for centuries science wa...

People who believe in God are possessed by demons. Those demons are very often their own, of course. In fact, those who fear themselves the most are the ones who also judge others the most. And they are also the one's who, like an inveterate gambler or a hopeless drug addict, will  not only vehemently deny they are incurably addicted to their "beliefs," but will very often respond to such an accusation in typically one of three ways. The first way is to play the victim, asking "why are you attacking my faith?" This question plays innocent, as if a person's desire to simply "believe" whatever it is they want is a perfectly harmless thing, even though believing things on flimsy to no evidence at all has been used to support bogus wars, every genocide of the 20th century (in one way or another), and can even be traced all the way back to Adam & Eve choosing to simply "believe" the serpent, despite no evidence to support his claim th...

It is very easy to yoke the cause of the rebel to the designs of the state. All one has to do is make them a martyr, and then, after some number of years have passed, give them a day all their own. And in this process, the state that was responsible for having killed the man, becomes as noble as the man himself, for having made his birthday a national holiday. The process of recasting a person's image works as much for bloodthirsty murderers for the state as it does for recasting non-violent heroes once seen as the greatest enemies of the state.  And in this way, the sinner and the saint become as noble as the state that has the wisdom and benevolence to recognize the sanctity of both, despite whatever personal shortcomings of each, which is why we celebrate both Columbus Day and Martin Luther King Day. This is no less true of Christ himself, of course, since all Constantine had to do to resurrect the image of so insignificant a heretic as Jesus was to turn his birthday into a ...

There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the world, and it has a longer shelf life. -- Frank Zappa

If one were ever to take the time to understand anything about the person of Jesus Christ, and by this I mean understand the historical context within which all of his lessons can only be properly understood, they would have to understand the nature of the very "covenant" that had not only been broken by David, but that Jesus was said to have come to restore. And perhaps one of the most relevant to today's world, of which no one but the poorest and most destitute would ever bother to pay attention, is that the original Twelve Tribes were never, ever, supposed to be "like other nations."  Not being like other nations was very much at the heart of the "covenant" that Israel had formed with their God. And by not being like other nations, Israel understood that they were not to have an earthly "king," especially since "kings" in those days were seen as gods, possessing the divine prerogative to determine right from wrong. It also m...

Religion tricks its supplicants into worshiping a fictional person called "God" and Jesus.  So it should be as no surprise that Conservatives worship the fictional people of corporations. For there is perhaps no greater truth than that the vast majority of those who pray to the former for their "daily bread," only ever receive it from the latter.  And it is not until they have grown tired of living on merely the crumbs of all those who, often without having to ever lift a finger or exert an ounce of effort, live so lavishly off of other people's labors, that it ever occurs to any of them that perhaps both sorts of fictional people are as evil as the devil himself.  Don't get me wrong- Jesus may have been a very real person, but the person that Christianity worships, other than it being based on that real person, is almost entirely fictional. And it is this habit of training people to believe in, and be completely dependent upon, fictional people, that r...

The lies of religion are some of the greatest lies ever conceived. So large are they, in fact, that they can only be said to have come from the father of all lies. Indeed, if there is any evidence for the existence of God, it comes from the fact that only the devil could've conceived of, and then convinced the world, that institutionalized religion - which, properly understood, has always been as opposite to "love" as hell is to heaven - could've come from God. Institutionalized religion, after all, takes every fear a person has, and magnifies it with the threat of hell. So that when the Catholic Church declares that homosexuality is "unnatural," for example, it takes the natural human fear that people have of the things they do not understand and of the unknown - which is the strongest of all human fears - and makes them infinitely worse. It does this, by dubiously claiming that such a "fear" is not a fear at all, but the voice of God, speaking ...