The Rant Institute

More than perhaps any other point in the story of Christ, Christians tend to focus of the crucifixion as the seminal event. In fact, for many Christians, the crucifixion is the seminal event in all of human history. This is why the most recognized Christian symbol the world over is the cross, rather than an empty grave. But when one considers the fact that such a brutal act only carries any meaning to human beings, and none at all to any other species of life, and especially to an all powerful everlasting God, it is hard to consider it to be anything but a form of emotional terrorism. It is, as it were, simply a spectacle of horrors designed to cattle-prod people into "believing" a story more out of emotional guilt than out of any consideration of whether such a story makes any rational sense whatsoever.  If we accept the idea that Christ's death and resurrection were necessary to forgive humanity its disobedience in the Garden of Eden by Adam & Eve, then we are sa...

 The Ouroboros is the symbol of a snake eating its own tail. This symbol also captures the great paradox of original sin and infallibility, for the former was caused by seeking the latter.    For Christians, the "old covenant" was one that had been broken by the disobedience of Adam and Eve. In truth, however, that story is but an allegory of the story of King David, who the Jews had always understood to be the one who actually broke the "old covenant," which was established with Moses on Mount Sinai.  When David claimed the throne of Israel and Judah for himself, he thus broke the First Commandment: 'You shall have no other God's before me." To become a King, as all ancient people understood at that time, was to "become like God," for Kings were the authors of the law, and thus the arbiters of "right and wrong."  Adam & Eve are believed to have "disobeyed" God by eating the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowl...

You have to be 16 years old to drive a car, 18 years old to smoke cigarettes, vote, or go to war, and 21 to buy alcohol. So why is there no minimum age for buying an assault rifle?   While "Federal law prohibits handgun ownership by any person under the age 18, with a handful of exceptions, there is no minimum age for long gun (i.e. rifle and shotgun) ownership." In 1984, the National drinking age was raised to 21. This was in response to the drunk driving epidemic of the 1970s. According to the NIH, as a result, drunk-driving accidents have dropped by 50 percent since the law passed, and the greatest proportion of this decline was among 16 to 20 year olds: approximately 37 percent of traffic fatalities in this age group were alcohol related in 2013 compared to more than 75 percent in the 1970s. The law was changed, in other words, to protect our children .   In 1987, the minimum age for smoking was raised from 16 to 18 , to protect our children...

The economist is to an economy what the psychiatrist is to our psyche. And in the same way the latter pretends to know what constitutes the "right" kind of mind, dispensing as many explanations for what they diagnose as wrong as drugs to fix the errors, so the former pretends to the same thing with a countries economy. But in truth, neither really understand either one,  since an economy is simply the result of all human minds, and even the simplest single human mind is still an infinite universe unto itself, perhaps 99.9% of which we either know nothing about, or have no real concrete understanding of.  The human mind, after all, is a chaotic universe of consciousness and subconsciousness, both of which exist in perpetual flux, reflexively reacting to any infinite array of environmental factors from without, as well as chemical, emotional, and psychological elements from within. An economy is simply a macrocosm of some ever changing number of interactions between those ...

The anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon pointed out in his book, What is Property?, one of the many paradoxes that exists between Capitalism and the state. That paradox is thus: Even as the most ardent supporters of the former clamor for the minimization of the latter, they deny the fact that with the greater accumulation of wealth by the capitalist comes an ever greater dependence upon both laws promulgated by the state, and the state itself to enforce those laws, and always at tax payer expense. The wars America wages around the world, then, from Korea and Vietnam to Iraq and Syria, are always clothed in the same verbiage of liberty and freedom. Such terms were used even by the Founding Fathers. By ringing the Pavlovian dinner bell of freedom and liberty, in other words, the average colonialist was lead frothing at the mouth to do the bidding of his financial masters, and hypnotized by their "beliefs" in God, they fought and died to overthrow the rule of King George from ab...

When David made himself "King of the Jews" - the very "sin" for which Jesus would later be labeled and crucified - he broke the covenant that the Jews had established with Yahweh  on Mount Sinai by breaking the First Commandment: "Thous shalt have no other gods before me." In those days, kings were viewed as gods, after all, for they operated above the law and their decrees were "infallible" and thus beyond questioning. He would also set out to build a temple, which served as a central bank, to consolidate both wealth and power in his own hands (rather than God's) by outlawing all other places of worship but the temple. And by doing so, he would lay the ground work for monopolizing religious power in the hand of his son Solomon, by forcing all Jews to rely on the 'money changers' in that temple to purchase the things they needed to make their required sacrifices to God. In Germany in 1517, the Catholic Church would pretty much do...

Christianity has largely become anti-Christ, ironically enough, and it did so by following in the footsteps of Judas Iscariot, selling "the body of Christ" for a purse of silver coins, and turning the garden of Eden into a potter's field.  Those purse strings have become the hangman's noose. If one of the apostles of Christ were transported in time to 21st century America, they would no doubt be at a loss to understand how the religion of a penniless pauper, who died defending the poor from the persecutions of the rich, became a religion for the rich to persecute the poor; from a religion of Lazarus that proclaimed it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, to a religion of the rich man's table, the crumbs of which would "trickle down" to the poor like manna from heaven.  This worship of an economic religion has transformed Christianity from a religion of salvation through sacr...

Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden for the sin of seeking knowledge; or more specifically, they were punished for wanting to know and be more like their Dad. So it makes sense that religion would be designed to maintain human ignorance, which is why it uses "beliefs" as a means of punishing us all for the "sin" of seeking such knowledge, even as it only claims to offer us such knowledge.  We see this in every attempt by Christians to assert some claim to a Bible full of "sacred knowledge," which they claim explains everything from the origin of the universe and the world, to the nature of love and sex, and from the nature of our souls to God's policing of our every thought.  The Bible, in other words, is believed by Christians to offer all of humanity the very thing that the Devil promised Adam and Eve would receive from eating the "forbidden fruit." That the Christian believes it is their God given duty to interpret ...

Walk into most Catholic churches, and you'll be struck by the larger than life representation of a man nailed gruesomely to a cross hanging from the ceiling, right above the altar, smack dab in the center of the church. The point, of course, is not only to remind people what sinful bastards they really are, but to also burn into their memory every Sunday the horrendous suffering and death that their 'savior' was forced to endure for their miserable hides because of it, which is why they should all fall to their knees in gratitude! Yet, when the priest explains that "Jesus died for our sins," no one ever thinks to ask the simple question of "Why?" or even, "Okay, but who asked him to?" The image is so gruesome and emotionally jarring, in fact, that it short-circuits the rational part of our brain called the cerebral cortex, by triggering a flood of endorphins called an "amygdala hijacking," which basically "baptizes...

For all of the talk by various self proclaimed "moral" authorities about  "moral absolutism," the truth is that every human on the planet is necessarily and inescapably a moral relativist. And this is because finite things can only be compared in any meaningful way to other finite things, because to compare them to infinite things makes them all equally inferior. As such, every "moral" comparison, a long with every other comparison, is necessarily "relative" to what it is being compared too, which includes any comparison to the infinite.  This then illustrates the glaring problem with the idea that God is "infinite" and "eternal," as well as being all powerful and all knowing. That problem is that if he is all of these things, then he cannot be used in anyway as a standard for any system of morality that could be applied to finite human beings. And this is because there is no way to compare an eternal and infinitely large...

People who are often the first to "believe" in Christ today, would have been the last to "believe" in him during his own day. They are just as often the first ones to deny this.

Disobedience has been the doorway to progress as often as "enlightenment" has always been denounced by those in power at the time, as an act of heresy. Those we view as heroes in retrospect, in other words, are always seen as heretics in their own time.  In short, we condemn the Devil for the same disobedience to authority that we applaud in Jesus Christ. Like Prometheus, Adam and Eve stole the fire of "knowledge" from a God who, out of a desire to keep humanity as dumb and obedient as domesticated beasts, had expressly forbidden them from learning. This same prohibition against learning was imposed upon African slaves by Christian Europeans, once the latter had been stolen  from their homeland and sold into slavery for the enrichment of the former.  And  like both Adam and Eve (and all of humanity that followed), the means by which those African slaves would eventually be kept ignorant with invisible chains, came from addicting them to a "desire"...

If there is a God at all, there is probably no greater sin a person can commit agaisnt him than to claim to "know" him better than anyone and everyone else. Yet such claims are the very heart of every religion, which is why religions themselves are no doubt the very apple offered to Adam & Eve in the garden of Eden, and why every person who claims to have some special knowledge of God, is no better than a serpent. Indeed, it was for seeking to obtain such forbidden knowledge that humanity is now said to be accursed with the stain of "original sin." To claim that God would create all people as equals, and then grant to some of those people a greater knowledge of Himself than to others, in a world where the eternal soul of every single person depends necessarily and exclusively upon such knowledge for its salvation, is not only to deny that God created everyone as equal, but to insist that God "intelligently designed" the world in such a way, that a...