The Rant Institute

Music is the religion that all religions try to be. And in their attempts, they almost reach the level of bad comedy.

The purpose of religion is to prevent the exercise of a genuine morality by too many people - one based on empathy and the mutual respect for the absolute autonomy of the individual - by supplanting it with a manufactured morality that is  “intelligently designed” by the architects of a given society. Those architects are always the rich and powerful, who keep and increase their wealth and power by always exempting themselves from having to obey the rules they ensure are imposed on everyone else, and always in stricter terms as one moves down the economic ladder. This is why St Augustine mentioned the difference between Kings and pirates is that one does with an armada what the other does with but a single ship. Modern societies are structured around the ownership of property, for example, but there is never any serious consideration of the legitimacy of the distribution of that ownership, let alone whether property ownership itself is by its very nature immoral. So, people jus...

To believe you are deserving of heaven is to deny you are in anyway responsible for the suffering of others. Instead, if anyone is put off by what you may say, or even how you may say it, it is their own fault. And it is their own fault, because they “can’t handle the truth.” It is equally to assume that you’re own suffering is only ever the fault of others who persecute you for your “beliefs.” And that it is the feeling of being persecuted for those beliefs that validates those beliefs more than anything else. This then proves the Christian is only ever using people to obtain their own salvation, since in the end they have not a single care for anyone who may end up in hell, even if it is their own child, just as long as they make it to heaven.

When Jesus said he could destroy the temple and rebuild it again in three days, without human hands,  it is often asserted by Christians  that he was talking about himself.  The Christian, however, ignores how the tomb he was buried in is likewise a version of  that same temple. The significance of Jesus  exiting the tomb is that it reverses the imprisoning of God in a temple by Solomon. In doing so, Solomon had sealed the God of Israel - a God who was unique among the ancient gods in not being housed in any sort of temple - in  what amounted to an elaborate man made sarcophagus. It was this imprisonment of God by Solomon at David’s behest, which David did for no other reason than that he wanted to secure dynastic rule for himself and his family alone, that was the great “original sin” that broke both the first commandment and the old covenant. In a sense, David’s desire to build a temple was like capturing lightning in a Lyden Jar, which would allow ...

How is any claim of infallibility regrading morality NOT the same thing as pretending to “be like God, knowing right from wrong,” which is exactly what the serpent promised Adam and Eve?

God gave us heaven, and in our quest to become like God and live forever in paradise, we turned it into hell. We want to live forever so bad that we loose the eternity of this very moment, a moment that will either never come again, or will repeat itself in any infinite number of forms, forever.  In either case, since both may be simply matters of perspective to us, it is the expectation of eternity in paradise, and more importantly the fear of loosing such an investment, that convinces us of the need to treat all those who we think threaten such a reward, as if they were evil. From our convictions about our beliefs, most of which have only convinced us to judge, blame, and kill each other, to our love of our own ideas, the more people try to be like Jesus, the more they only ever act like the devil.

There is a video circulating on the internet today of  Prince George, the son of prince William and grand son of Princess Diana, learning his ABCs. In the video, an off screen voice says the letter, and Prince George - who is roughly 4 years old or so - replies by using a word that starts with that letter in a sentence. When the voice says “C”, for example, the child replies “cast your cares on the lord.” All or nearly all of the sentences are dutifully repeated by the child using a sentence that clearly shows a unwavering devotion to Jesus, and also how the child’s “free will” has been completely eradicated through an indoctrination that no doubt started from birth. The Christian would immediately object to this kind of teaching as pure immersive brainwashing if the child was doing this with anything other than God, but because it is their own special brand of the Christian god, Christians think it is clearly the most beautiful thing they have ever seen. For Christians, such...

It is amazing when you think about it. The Christian believes they can love the sinner and hate the sin even though they think they can’t separate themselves from their beliefs. But what if a person’s “beliefs” are their sin? In fact, Christians separate the two no where more proudly and often than with the sins of their saints, minimizing the former as much as possible in order to maximize their use of the latter, and usually for no other reason than that their life or ideas were graciously favorable to the institution which had not only provided them with a an income for as long as they supported it more than opposed it,  but is also solely responsible for their canonization as well. Where, then, is the reward for daring to follow in the footsteps of Christ and challenging that institution at all costs, challenging power by saying as he did, “the law was made to serve man, not man to serve the law”? Recognizing that all institutions are inherently incapable of practicin...

“It’s a good thing we killed Jesus or God would never have forgiven us for eating an apple.” Christianity: divine proof that two wrongs make a right.

Telling the difference between brilliance and insanity is as easy as telling if a glass is half empty or half full. The hard part is telling what it's full of.

You need a holy book to make you think you deserve to live forever for “believing” that your hatred of people who are different from you, is both a form of love and your cross to carry, as well as being the surest “proof” that god loves you. And you know he does, after all, because if you don’t try to make their life hell on earth by getting them to see how right you are in your interpretation of the Bible, your Bible assures you that your “loving” father in heaven will surely turn your afterlife into one.

Ya ever think about the fact that corporations are more powerful than ancient pagan gods, with the power to do everything from bringing  people back from the dead to producing virgin births, thanks to their technology; that google is just another name for the monotheistic mind of God, with the internet being compared to an AI brain of synaptic cell phones (which is wrapped around and killing the planet like a crown of thorns); that Amazon is just another name for the Garden of Eden, and that "advertiser" is just another name for a "snake"oil salesman; or that the "profit motive" is really "the love of money" and hence "the root of all evil;" or that we worship the idea of being as rich as Goldman Sachs like a golden calf, and that we made the former with our money in the very same way the followers of Moses, who sought to build something they could believe in after they had lost faith in their God and each other, had melted ...

For everything Hemingway ever wrote, writing is simply a form of intellectual excrement. As we imbibe the world around us through our eyes, it passes through the bowels of our brain, and pours out of us back into the world in the form of mental manure. In this respect, philosophy, religion, and all quests for "truth," are simply different forms of mental masturbation, resulting in an ejaculation of endorphins which continually baptize the writer’s brain, and which not only makes him feel like a god by spilling the blood of every idea he has and beating it to a pulp - ideas he wears like a crown of thorns - but which allows him to deflower an endless procession of empty pages like so many Mohammedan virgins, and all to stroke his own ego through the priapism of his pen. Perhaps this is why the page always wears white and the writer feels he is married to nothing so much was his own ideas.  

The Bible is said to be the "word" of God, even though many scientists tend to think that the fabric of reality itself is written in numbers. In the same way that Christians ignore this contradiction, however, they likewise overlook how much the Bible only discusses the nature of God, not through the infinite details sandwiched between a single atom and the cosmos, but only through the actions of those who sought to draw ever greater power unto themselves; and nearly always through spilling blood in the name of their holy God. The bible, in other words, is not the story of God, but of men who everywhere sought to become like God, much in the same way the devil is alleged to have done. And in the same way such a quest would prove to be the devil's undoing, casting him from the greatest of the angels to the most despised, so too humanity's quest to "become" like Jesus has only ever resulted in the undoing of mankind, and made him a Nazi to every other specie...

There is no end to the interpretations of the bible stories, either each one individually or all of them collectively. But the simplest way to understand the bible is that it is a polemic agaisnt the rise of civilization.  What have been constants throughout recorded human history is not only the continual struggle between those who wish to cling to the old and those who seek for a better future,  those who dare for a "brave new world" and those who think our best days were behind us, but also the perennial conflict between those who wish to wield power over others and those "others" who wish to rid themselves of those who seek to subjugate them.  And since history is imbued everywhere with such constants, it is probably safe to assume that they likewise existed in pre-history as well, long before humans had ever configured its grunts and noises into a common language, and subsequently reduced that language to the atoms of an alphabet. Every new inventi...

We are living in the days of Narcissus and Noah, without realizing those stories are essentially one and the same, in the same way that Adam and Eve crucified themselves, and humanity itself, on a tree of knowledge. And as high speed fiber optic cables circle the globe like a crown of thorns, we sacrifice the whole world in our quest to be ever more like God. In the same way that religion champions as a virtue our desire to fall in love with and even worship what is simply our own reflection in the sky - an eternal, all knowing, perfection of ourselves that we call  "God" - so we trade our Eden of earth for the apple in our pocket that seduces us like a serpent, with the "selfie" of our own reflection, that will live forever in a utopian paradise where we want for nothing and need nothing, called the internet. It is there, on the internet, where our pursuit of ever greater freedom is only ever used to create ever greater control in the church of technology and t...

Sigmund Freud once said that because of people's desires, which if allowed to be followed to their natural ends would prove fatal to society, there would always be a need for some kind of control. Freud was a product of the intellectual and cultural paradigms he had been born into, of course, which is why his study of the human mind never included those who were born wholly outside of societies that had, at their core, an ethos for fabricating consumers just as much as submissive obedient citizens.  Reinhold Niebuhr touched on this idea, and how the controlling elements of society were the root of so many of modernity's woes, in his book, Moral Man, Immoral Society . Such an idea was even echoed in Rousseau's quip that "man is born free but is everywhere in chains."  The seed of this control starts with the acceptance of irrational beliefs, including the idea that it is necessary for any given society to have a ruler or king of some sorts, which children ...

The real and perhaps only miracle of religion is how it succeeds in blinding "believers" to the incredibly obvious problems of their faith, which only ever show how purely man made their "belief" systems really are, while at the same time convincing them that they can win eternal paradise through the religious devotion to denying such problems are problems at all, even though they are so painfully obvious to everyone else.  Take the power disparity between God and the devil.  According to the Bible, the devil was a pretty exceptional angel, compared to all of the other angels. In fact, the Bible describes him as the highest angel of them all. So even though Lucifer is pretty exceptional compared to all of the other angels, this by no means makes him a god, which is the very thing he apparently got in trouble for wanting to be.  So then why is there this constant power struggle between the Devil and God? This is like saying there is a power struggle betw...

"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength." We see this quote in Deuteronomy 6:5, Matthew 22:37, Mark 12:30, and Luke 10:27.  How utterly insane it is for someone to "love" someone on command. Yet not a single Christian sees anything odd about this at all, and instead think people deserve whatever eternal tortures await them for failing to do so.  If we changed the word "God" in this quote to, say, Government, or Nike, or Kim Jong-il, Joseph Stalin, Jim Jones, Howdy Dowdy, or even oneself, the Christian would immediately and rightly object. But when it is "God," even though such a word is far too abstract to mean anything definitively useful, the Christians seems to think it is even more natural to "love" on command than to sleep, breath, or eat.  As such, the only thing more fascinating to the atheist than the Christian who thinks people s...

When Lucifer eventually displeased God, at least according to John Milton's telling of it, God cast him out of heaven the same way he cast Adam & Eve out of the Garden of Eden. But that was about it.  God did not declare emphatically that "monotheism" is the one true perspective on god, and then set up an inquisition shortly thereafter to torture and kill anyone, or even any angel, who dared to question His authority as God.  But that's pretty much the very opposite of what the Catholic Church did, and what every religion has ever done. Indeed, since the days of Noah and Sodom and Gomorrah, apparently no God has ever taken it upon himself or herself, to directly instruct his "beloved children" on how He or She wants them to behave. This is true whether we are killing each other in World Wars, with atom bombs, or committing genocides every time He turns around.   In fact, the only way the Catholic Church has ever acted like God is when, to pr...

How would a person go about discovering a "new" God? In 1781, William Herschel  noticed an object he first suspected to be a comet. The object had been catalogued before, but the motion had not been detected. Herschel eventually recognized it as a new planet circling the Sun, and after several years, wherein astronomers had established the orbit of that new planet, it was named Uranus, for the Greek god of the heavens. Now, let us assume that the "god of the heavens" is the Christian God, which was only discovered to be the "one and only God" roughly two thousand years ago, since for countless thousands of years before that, the vast majority of people on the planet (that we know anything about) believed in the existence of multiple gods. So how would one then go on to test that "monotheism" is correct, and that polytheism is incorrect? How do we discover, in other words, whether the "monotheism" hypothesis is true or false? After...

Religion teaches people that "beliefs" are what really matter, and that having the "right" beliefs is the only thing that can prevent a person from otherwise becoming a raving psychopath who would rape you as soon as murder your children.  It is our "beliefs" after all, that are necessary for making people moral, without which we would all quickly devolve into cannibalistic savages. But for the rosary and mass at 7 a.m. every morning of the week, even grandmothers would be selling heroin to kids in kindergarten and doing drive-bys for a parking space at the grocery store. It is this absurd notion that one "belief" is somehow better at making us more "moral" that leads people who subscribe to whichever "belief" is lauded about in a given society as being the one necessary for doing so, that makes them think that their "thoughts" and "ideas" are therefore better than the thoughts and ideas of those who...

Perhaps the central and biggest problem with all of the major religions is that they have never defended the right of a person to be wrong.  It is far easier for an atheist to defend the right of the Branch Davidians to "believe" in a God, for example, then for a Christian or even the Catholic Church, to defend the right of atheists to believe that Christianity is simply a cult based on claims that are as self contradictory and unsubstantiated as they are utterly unfalsifiable.  Both oppose the beliefs of the other, only the difference is that the atheist opposes religion because he does not want to be burned alive or beheaded by a religious zealot, while the Christian or Muslim opposes atheism because he does not want to burn alive for all of eternity for failing to do so. The former can tolerate the "beliefs" of the latter, even if they seem utterly irrational, if only they would stop trying to "convert" (i.e. indoctrinate or simply impose by fo...

Everything is a metaphor for everything, including this sentence. And yes, I know that that means nothing. But I repeat myself.

First off, let's look at the reasoning of Pascal's wager, even though it's never so simple as Pascal proposes.  To accept a "belief" for fear that I could roast forever in a hell hotter than an oven at Auschwitz, is only the highest form of emotional terrorism there is, and makes a complete mockery of the whole idea that God gave us our ability to reason to seek and find him, just so we could boil it all down to "what have I got to loose?"  Secondly, you have everything to loose, and not only in this life but the next.  Let's assume there is an afterlife, for example, but you're entire life you've followed a religion that is actually nothing but a tool of the very devil your "religion" claims to only ever be working against?  Assuming there is no afterlife, on the other hand, what would you dare to try and be in this life, if there was no chance at any other, and the only experiences you will ever have in all of ...

It has always struck me as odd that we must constantly nag the most powerful being imaginable, in order for that "being" to have any power in our puny little world, or our even punier little lives. Christians call this nagging "prayer," which they believe is to ask God for help, even though their God allegedly is "all powerful," and even knows what they need before they ask, but almost never has the decency to respond. Hordes of praying "believers" the world over simply ignore the fact that this is like requiring a child to cry before you decide to change the diaper you already know they've soiled, or only considering helping someone who you know is in pain only after they have complained long enough, and complained with the proper gratitude for the assistance you are considering to give.  True, like meditation, prayer may provide some significant degree of peace for the person engaging in it, and there is no doubt that it helps to f...