The Rant Institute

Knowledge destroyed the garden of Eden, and "ignorance" is knowledge of how to resurrect that Eden, by blaming someone else for having destroyed it.

Are you the person you always wanted to be, or are you the person that someone else always wanted you to be? And is it even possible for us to ever really tell the difference? If you ever saw the movie, Dead Poet's Society, you know how a child can be caught between being who they want to be when they grow up, and being who their parents want them to be. In that movie, Niel Perry is caught in this dilemma, when he discovers his true passion is to be an actor. His heavy handed authoritarian father, however, is adamant that his son become a doctor instead. In a sense, Niel Perry represents the Native Americans, and Neil's father represents the Native American's "White Father." In many ways, this dilemma also illustrates on a spiritual level the difference between the "believer" and the atheist,  for it is the difference between the person who thinks it is a virtue to grow up to be who someone else wanted them to be - like growing up...

To believe in God is to believe the universe has a mind of its own. It is also to believe that we are not the ones who are currently in the process of building that mind. But what if we are, and like our children, we are teaching it our morality far more by what we do than by what we say? We may like to think our "ideals" of justice, equality, and freedom are common to most people in America, for example. But there is no way a "universal morality" based on equality can ever emerge from a society that thinks it is perfectly moral to treat people unequally economically. In a society that accepts it to be perfectly moral for some people to have far more than most, in other words, “morality” will always be relative to one’s net worth. "Survival of the fittest" is the morality of the jungle, after all.   Man is a connector, the conduit between which physical reality can be transformed and "designed" via an intelligence (our own) into something it ...

"Don't think for yourself! Let God Do all the thinking for you!"  If God was a new product being sold to people today, like "Google glasses" or Elexa, the above sentence might very well be a sales slogan to convince people - especially one's who are exhausted from overwork and stress - that their life would be infinitely easier, if they just let "God take the wheel." In fact, that's probably how anyone who ever joined a cult, or gang, or religion, thought about it.    The objective of religion is to capture and keep at least part of the human mind in a permanent state of adolescence, so that it is forever looking to an "all knowing" parent for answers, as if that eternal parent were both an Oracle and our god; deserving of our love and worship because of its "super intelligence." (One might as well be talking about Artificial Intelligence, Google, or even an alien species.)  It is our real parents, ironically en...

In the same way animal sacrifice was a way of worshiping the gods, and Jesus was a form of human sacrifice to a God, so all warfare, bloodshed, and violence, are different forms of "sacrifice" in the worship of power. And those who die faithfully in the service of that power, are always hailed as heroes and martyrs.  We are not the children of Able, after all, we are the children of Cain, which is why we are turning Eden into Gehenna.  

In a world run by people who are more calculating than computers, and who are driven mostly if not exclusively by greed, those who have any desire to spend time experiencing life as a human being have always become the casualties.  Or to put it another way, the monster of the future has always devoured the people of the past, the same way Columbus would lead to the devouring of the Native Americans. And that monster is called "progress." Computers, in this respect, are us, just minus our emotions. And we are the dreams those computers are having, as well as the nightmares.   And those nightmares are the result of a world run by people who are more calculating than computers, and who are driven mostly if not exclusively by greed, who have always devoured those who spend time experiencing life as a human being.   In a world of "survival of the fittest," the winner has to be the biggest psychopath of all.  And they usually only get that way, ...

The God of money is man, and the only God of man is money. That's why it says "In God We Trust" on our money. And why, when we go to church on Sundays, that's usually what everyone there is asking for and hoping to get. And why Joel Osteen is the Anthony Robbins of Christianity.

 "Do you have Jesus?" was the question. So I said... "You mean, like, in the trunk of my car or something?”  And as she began to clarify her question, I said... "Look - We are all rushing to our graves, trying to build a "better world." And by "better world" I mean mostly more comforts, conveniences, and entertainment (and war is the greatest entertainment of all), even though we all know that everything we are doing to build this "better world" is killing us just as much as our planet - which just happens to be the only planet on which any of those things can even exist, as far as we know. And you're telling me that none of that should matter, as long as I have Jesus?  Do you have any idea how much "having Jesus" has contributed to this mess?" Nor is the person who  claims to "have Jesus" somehow going to have the solutions to all of our problems. In fact, history shows the ...

If you watched the mini series about Waco and David Koresh, Koresh explained that a "messiah" is actually a name we give to anyone who "saves us," and in the show it was one guys mom who had "saved" him.  So, what if Rome wanted us to believe that Jesus was "the son of God," so we would never again use the term "Christ" to describe anyone around us today. In fact, anyone who claims to be "Christ," is today branded as either a heretic or a lunatic, or both. Because if you look around, you can see Christs everywhere.  (And I'm not talking about seeing dead people.)

Since Neo in the Matrix is simply a modern retelling of Jesus in the Bible, maybe the "demons" that Jesus would cast out of people was what today we would call our own ego. And not just our ego. Maybe it was also what we would call "fictional persons" (like corporations, banks, or even nations), whose interests are so sacred to us we are willing to brutally torture and murder each other to prove it. And they all use religion to convince us that doing so is simply the cross we must carry, to please our Gods.

The pen is said to be mightier than the sword, even though the Bible is always used to justify war.  Knowledge is said to be power, even though ignorance is bliss, and most people prefer bliss, because they know they have no power.  The pen is said to be mightier than the sword,  even though we hate the scholar and love the soldier.  Knowledge is said to be power, even though ignorance is an addiction to fear that spreads like a virus. The "love of money" is not the root of all evil, the love of power is.  Which is why nations and religions were created as Trojan Horses to carry darkness, fear, control, war, and ignorance, into our soul, wrapped in flags and symbols of nobility and morality. And as Arundhati Roy pointed out about "flags," they're just colored bits of cloth "that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead." That's why all those who play God only ever ac...

The reason it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, is because the rich man can never leave the "system" that has afforded him the luxury of being rich.  Nor can he stand the idea of ever having to be truly "equal" with the rest of "the vulgar herd" of humanity.  So he does everything in his power to prevent such a possibility from happening. For "if it once became general," as George Orwell wrote, "wealth would confer no distinction." With religion, they even fashion slogans like, "the poor you will always have with you," as Jesus is alleged to have said, as if even God is admitting there's just nothing we can do to end poverty around the world. So we'll just have to accept it.  Such an idea is designed to alleviate the guilt of inaction.  With economics, they use the poor as a stick and the rich as a carrot, as a constant thr...

The question of whether "God exists" is actually a meaningless question, when you consider that we do not know what we mean exactly by the word "God," and the only concept we can possibly have of the word "exists" is entirely within a time-space continuum, that we are claiming this "God" not only preceded and created, but is also wholly independent of.  To say God "exists" outside of all of what we can think of as "existence" itself,  is like saying I would still exist even if I did not exist.  It is like trying to imagine what it would be like to "not exist," at least not within any sense of time or space.  And as soon as we imagine anything like a God, we necessarily think of that God as inhabiting a time and a place, because we cannot imagine what it is like in the absence of either one, let alone both.   So the question is not "does God exist or not," since "God" is an infinitel...

Is there "a first time for everything" or is there "nothing new under the sun"? The former connotes a sense of optimism, and the latter a sense of pessimism; one looks up, the other looks down.   But from our perspective, it's obviously impossible to tell, especially if time travels in a loop. As such, it's just whichever we chose to believe.

Thomas Jefferson concluded that African slaves were not included in his claim that "all men are created equal," less because of any biological or Biblical basis for believing so, and more because of his confirmation bias for the legitimacy of the "slave" economy that was making him so rich. Jefferson's affection for his own wealth, and the sincere belief that his own moral rectitude meant he fully deserved it, shaped his conclusion that enslaving Africans must have been a perfectly moral thing for him do, because that is how God designed things to be. Jefferson saw the world, in other words, through money colored glasses. And when you see the world through the color of money, everything becomes something to be owned, bought, and sold; including each other. And those who spill the most blood eradicating anyone who seeks to impede this process, are given medals, power, and praise. 

There are only two kinds of time travelers who travel from the future into the past: the savior and the serpent.  One goes back to spread peace and stop the bloody wars we have already fought, and the other who arrives in the past seeking to profit from the wars to come. To date, humanity on the whole has only ever crucified the former and made gods of the latter.  

War is when people turn their love of a country or an idea into a hatred for people who just happen to live somewhere else or think differently from ourselves.  And the more intensely we feel the former, the easier it is for us to butcher the latter. It's when those in power so succeed at convincing us that they are the only reason we are "free" and a "great nation," that when they tell us to go to war, we rush off with "faith" and conviction to butcher each other to death in the meat grinder of one battlefield or another. And we do it, without question! We do it out of love of country and family, which are the very same reasons our enemies are all rushing to meet us, near and far, and with just as much enthusiasm as ourselves. And they do this, by convincing us that the more we help to increase their wealth and power over us, the happier and "freer" we will become, because their good fortunes will "trickle down" to us, like t...

Christians fail to understand that their "Jesus" is simply a simplified caricature of their God the same way Santa Claus is a simplified caricature of our parents. The difference is that, for the Christian, God is Ward Cleaver, while for the atheist, he's Richard Kuklinski.  Or to put it another way, to all those who are willing to grow up to be the person God (or more specifically his earth bound man-made Church) says you should be (i.e. "must be" to avoid eternal hell), and who are willing to grovel to his "greatness" and only ever speak in glowing favorable terms of how "God is a God of love" (and not a purveyor of pedophiles and genocide), God only ever looks like Ward Cleaver. This takes serious sustained effort, by the way, which is why weekly indoctrination is mandatory and why constant reading and study of the indoctrination manual (i.e. the Bible)  is encouraged. But to anyone who wishes to grow up to be anything oth...

The internet and virtual reality technology, indeed even drugs, are not the first things we created that allowed us to live in a "virtual world," far removed from reality and all of the suffering and hardships it contains. The first devices humans ever created that allowed people to escape into such a virtual reality was religion, and then money. Money, in other words, provides the wealthiest of all with the miracle of living in heaven on earth, even when doing so requires putting everyone else in hell.  Money, as such, allows us to purchase an escape from the real world, and the worst that life has to offer. Hence, money does to reality itself what drugs do to our mind. Where heroin hides from us the hell we have fallen into in the real world, by hoking us on our euphoria, money pays to insulate a person from how much the world is going to hell around them, and affords the richest of all the luxury to deny that they are the ones responsible for sending it there.  The wea...

Humans who think they can understand the mind of an "intelligent designer" from within the universe He is said to have created are like goldfish who claim to know something about the mind of a human being from within the fishbowl that a human keeps on their shelf. In fact, given that the difference between the mind of God and man is infinity greater than the difference between the mind of man and that of a goldfish, it would be far more likely that a goldfish could understand everything humans have ever done or thought over the course of at least 200,000 years, than that humans could ever come close to doing the same thing with an infinite God over the course of eternity. But that never stops the true "believer" from insisting they damn well do anyway, and that the world damn well better believe it, or they'll be hell to pay!  

Christians love to personify good and evil in their characters of God and the devil, which one can see even in the similarity of the spelling. But those same Christians often can't seem to see that, in the same way, Donald Trump is the personification of America, in full monty. Trump, in other words, is America. Or to be more specific, Trump is American Capitalism, standing naked in front of us all, like the emperor parading around in his "new clothes." And Trump himself is America's "free -market" messiah, whose supporters worship him like the golden calf, which they were proud to claim they had all made with their own hands.  And as everyone knows, the "emperor" and his nation are one and the same. And those who hate him, those who want a "better" president, are basically saying they object, not to a system that manufactures people like Trump and treats them like heroes and even puts them in power, but to allowing such a sy...

"If I could stop a person from raping a child," Tracie Harris of the Atheist Experience (#795) once quipped, "I would.  That's the difference between me and your God." The Christian will immediately object to this statement, of course, arguing that God cannot intervene because he is bound to respect our free will, regardless of how many child are raped by his priests, or whatever other horrors humanity everywhere inflicts upon itself. But while Harris's statement is simply dismissed by Christians due to "free will," it certainly does not explain why the Catholic Church only exercised its own "free will" by doing everything in its power to hide and facilitate the abuse. Worse, however, is that many Catholics see the church's participation in the aiding and abetting of those crimes as in no way impugning its ability speak "infallibly" about any and all issues concerning "faith and morals" - which is a phrase in...

Politicians are basically serial killers who are so charismatic that we allow them to kiss our babies and steal our wallets. And priests are so good at gas-lighting us, we continue to send our children to them, even after we discover they'd been using the same power they use on us every Sunday (to keep us 'hypnotized' in a "belief" in their particular brand of God), to also facilitate the rape of our children, around the world, for decades. And when I see a priest today, dressed in capes and robes and getting people to drink blood, all I see is Bela Lugosi dressed up like Count Dracula saying to his prey, "Look into my eyes!" 

Nations, like religions, rise to power not because they are the most morally superior, as if "truth" and good always triumph over evil, but because they have been the most ruthless, most oppressive, most obstinate, and the most successful deceivers of all time. Power only rises out of a primordial soup of deceptions, because even power itself is simply a deception.   The devil always rises to power by becoming a messiah, in other words, that people then come to worship like a golden calf. And by doing so, we allow evil itself to "clothe naked villainy / With old odd ends stolen forth from holy writ/And seem a saint when most (we) play the devil."

We are Dr. Frankenstein, and we are also his monster, in the same way we are both God and the devil he created We are not Adam & Eve in the story of Eden, we are the serpent, to each other, by “intelligent design.” We are the serpent Ouroboros, and how we treat each other is evidence of how our mind can twist our heart with its “beliefs,” which is why the devil is said to be a liar and “God” is said to be “love.” And by doing so, our mind uses love to turn our hearts into a crown of thorns.

Anyone who bothers to read the bible before being 'brainwashed' about the "correct" way one must necessarily read that bloody tome, is left with the unmistakable conclusion that the God the Christian worships is actually the Devil himself.  In fact, most atheists are actually Christians who bothered to take the time to read the Bible, and think about it critically rather than just being spoon-fed by those who derive all of their power from our willingness to "believe" whatever they tell us.  And doing so is what lead them to discover this very fact for themselves.  This seems just as utterly preposterous to the Christian, of course, as suggesting to the followers of Charles Manson or Jim Jones that both of those men were simply insane. Crusades, Inquisitions, and aiding and abetting pedophile priests on a global scale over the course of decades is never enough "fruit" for the Christian to ever admit the "tree" they worship - an e...

Christians see themselves as being tuned into God's radio station, as if every thought they ever had of God, much like every Sunday sermon they swallow in every Christian church, is really a podcast being pumped into their souls from the Holy Spirit. Our "soul," so the Christian story suggests, is like a radio, that picks up the faint sound of a distant radio broadcast of God's will and his moral laws, transmitting from a radio tower in heaven. The problem they argue, is that the signal is too attenuated for most people to hear it clearly, and the biggest reason for this impediment is that we were all born as broken radios to begin with. And why did God make us all into broken radios to begin with? Well, the Christian would argue it was all our fault, as if God was incapable of making a better human being than the one he had become so disappointed with once before already, that he had decided the only merciful thing to do was to murder nearly all of t...

Christianity is the belief that to be like god we must be trained like an animal. And society is a collective denial of responsibility for the state of society.

We watch how the private sector and the public sector so often seem to collide, but like children watching a puppet show, we never notice how often it is the very same people who sit at the top in both, who are always the ones pulling the strings. And for as long as we chose to believe their ruse, they will continue to treat us all like children.

Can a person create a personality that is wholly different from the one they wear in the real world? Can a person create one personality that is an awful person online, for example, and another that is an angel in the real world? Is the difference between God and the Devil, Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, simply the elixir of technology, that lures us into a false vision of heaven, and takes our very souls in the process?  What if what lurks in the internet is simply our collective dark side, a mere reflection of the world around us that we have created,  which is so bad, we have to design elaborate religions to help us justify, blame, or deny? What if all institutions, and nearly all societies, were simply Leland Gaunt from Needful Things, and only gave us what we wanted, after we had agreed to victimize someone else? Who would we be willing to hurt, for us to have the gods we need? 

There are an assortment of alt-right atheists who dutifully serve the state they claim to loath so much, by everywhere condemning Muslims for their worst. But there is no sin that a Muslim has ever committed that has not first been committed, and sometimes on a far greater scale, by a Christian. Nor does the moral superiority that comes from pointing out the sins of others ever ensure that those who think as we do will never do the same thing, whether today or in the future. And an atheist who would argue otherwise may only be biased by their feeling of intellectual superiority, or far worse, simply evangelizing the religion of their preferred political ideology. Those who cast stones always think they have the birds eve view of morality, even though they never notice they are sitting on top of a mountain of bones.

Christians think so highly of their own ideals that they have made them into a religion so they could worship them as their god. And mostly because the Christian is quite convinced that they are so special, and mostly because of their "faith," that they clearly deserve to live forever, even if nothing and no one else does.  By turning the worship of their own human ideals into a religion, they weekly assure themselves, and labor to indoctrinate their children, that it is always better to die as a martyr than to live with the admission that such ideals are just as deeply flawed as any other, because like all ideals, they are purely human. The Christian denies that this is what they are doing, of course, insisting instead that their "ideals" come straight from God alone, as if their mind were a radio that was, by virtue of being "Christian," finely tuned to receive such divine communications, and with little to no static. Ask them to offer any evidence...

Only after the last tree is cut down,the last of the water poisoned, the last animal destroyed... only then will you realize you cannot eat money."  - Cree Indian Prophecy

Our economic system is a religion masquerading as a science, just as much as our religion is war masquerading as peace.  In the same way economics turns every religious virtue into a vice, it also turns every religious vice into a profit maximizing virtue.   And for its lies, which it sells to us through our politicians and apologizes for with our religions, it promises to make us all rich, if we will but love it with all of our hearts, our minds, and our souls. It is a religion that turns human survival into a gladiatorial blood sport, using cities as the coliseums, and all for the amusement of the "intelligent designers." In a system built exclusively on "survival of the fittest," where the very ethos is that people must compete for the money to purchase their comforts and even their very survival, violence is a kind of worship of those "gods" who "intelligently designed" this system, and based it exclusively on competition, while ...

Business is a form of economic warfare, among empires built on the monopolization of industry or resource, where the greatest rewards are given to all those who are, for the greatest profits, willing to inflict the greatest cruelties on the rest of us. In fact, war is the mother of nations. People used to take drugs to tune out in the 1960s, while today they have to take drugs to tune in. ADD and ADHD are, for the vast majority of people (if not all), purely environmental.  Adderall is proof that the pharmaceutical industry can convince people that the stimulant they're taking - you know, the one that is giving the person all the euphoria of religion, only at 5 times greater concentration than that of regular street heroin - is actually the way they are supposed to feel, all the time. And that not feeling like that all the time, and just feeling "normal," is actually abnormal. And financial collapses are always "intelligently designed," as are...

We are taught about God to be trained like a dog. And with our economics we think of people as less than a cockroach, which is at least a living thing, and more of just an asset, resource, or liability. We are no longer human beings. We are dogs who dream they are humans who dream they are made in the image and likeness of God. We are machines who dream to be dogs, who dream they are humans who are made in the image and likeness of god. We are human simulacra.

I love how sometimes Christians will argue that God allows bad things to happen so that people will turn more to God. But that means they are "worshiping" a "God" who allowed their children to be molested by his priests, so they would want to get to know that God even better.  Or the fact that 9/11 happened in September of 2001, just months after the Boston Globe began digging deep into the sex abuse scandal in Boston, was simply God's attempt to delay their investigation.

I love to listen to the city sleep, with the smell of its breath on the breeze, the sound of its pulse in its traffic, and the echo of dreams waltzing off in the distance to that percussion, like lovers strolling in the rain in Paris, while the whole city sleeps.

The NRA does not give a single rat's ass about anyone's "Rights," whether those found in the 2nd Amendment or in any other. It only cares about selling guns in the exact same way tobacco companies are interested in selling ever more tobacco, not protecting people's lungs. This is a "capitalist system," after all, which means no one does anything unless it's to turn a profit! The NRA is not some exception to this rule, as if it is the only "association" with purely or mostly altruistic intent. If that were true, the NRA would not give a single damn if more people bought guns or not. They would be as interested in defending the right to "keep and bare arms," as the NAACP is in protecting the rights of minorities, and NOW - regardless of whether you agree with their position - works to protect the rights of privacy for women. In fact, if NOW worked the same way that the NRA worked, they'd be arguing that the answer to so ma...

The problem with showing people who love their various "wizards" and religions what's behind the curtain, is that they will only ever hate you for it. People, after all, never want the truth, they only ever want their truth. 

The difference between religion and reality is the same difference between looking at the world like an economist or a business man and looking at it like an ecologist or a biologist. Or it’s like the picture where, depending on how you interpret it, you see either a young woman or an old lady. And while the economist and the business man see the world as a prostitute, to be used as they see fit, the ecologist and the biologist see the world as their aged mother, whom they love.

Internet addiction is the result of people escaping into a virtual world from a reality that they find too complicated  to understand or too scary to accept. Religious addiction is basically the same thing.

If you want to actually learn anything at all, you have to first be willing to be puzzled by the world. If you want to obtain timeless wisdom, you must first admit that you are forever the greatest fool.

I often struggle to determine whether the world is truly fascinating or simply terrifying, and whether the only difference between the two is simply my interpretation. After all, we can chose to treat everything and everyone in the world like an enemy, or a friend. When you think about it... to computers, we are Gods. We are also the "gods" who created governments and corporations, and if we are wondering how the one will eventually grow up to treat us in the future, just look at how the other two have been treating us for centuries. Our mind is like the internet, and our doubts are the trolls. What if the internet is the spirit of evil incarnate? Or what if it is the doorway through which hell creeps ever more into the world, by stealing our minds and our time, with the promise of a cyber paradise, where all of our dreams and desires are forever fulfilled? And we're all addicted to it more than any religion, and all religions combined.  

Christians actually believe they are mind readers. They just think the mind they can "read" is that of an infinitely omniscient god. And through a miracle of "faith," they are able to deny that this "god" they worship every Sunday, is simply their own alter ego. Church, in other words, is a support group for all those who think that "suffering" for their own "delusion of grandeur" should be celebrated as a public spectacle.  But for a person to think they are, alone among all other animals, made in the image and likeness of such a "god," is like an ant saying that it, alone among all other insects, is made in the image and likeness of the Andromeda  galaxy.

It's funny, if not just utterly hypocritical, to hear Christians complaining about how Big Pharma is hooking people everywhere on drugs for a variety of purely bogus mental conditions or mental "diseases" that their advertising departments dreamed up out of thin air, when you consider that institutional Christianity amassed all of its wealth and power by doing the exact same thing for two thousand years. Worse, Christianity, like other religions, murdered anyone who dared to challenge those bogus claims, from Socrates to Christ. While one sells us the idea that we are sick in our minds, the other sells us the idea that we are sick in our souls, as if the mind is necessarily and altogether different from what we mean by our "soul."  Of course, the Christian adamantly refuses to ever consider for a single second that they are no different from the Big Pharma in selling the drug of God, and hope, and all to combat the drug of fear that their religions only...

We have created every "god" there is or ever was, at least any that can ever be conceived of by a human being anyway. The Christian God is the most recent version of this as an "ideal" projection of how the human form was "made in the image and likeness" of a wholly immaterial, infinite and eternal intelligence. The real world versions of the "pagan" gods of our mythologies are now our corporations and financial institutions, which themselves are the children of the governmental "gods" that we created, dating all the way back to King David and before. All of our systems reflect this willingness to submit to the yoke of one ruler or another. From the Pharaohs to the money changers, from monarchs to CEOs, from Belgium to DC to Rome, we build our temples and make them our gods.     

Arguing for a reduction in government or regulation of what business is doing is like arguing you want the guy who is blaming you for everything that is wrong with the world, to stop talking so he can focus on strangling you to death with his bare hands.

What if the richest people in the world are all aliens from another planet, and they're using all of us to bleed the planet dry of all life,tempting us with the desire to live in penthouses by getting us to turn our earthly Eden into a barren hell?   I mean, maybe before they got here, they tested out this little system on Mars.

In the end, we are judged by those we judge. We use various things and ideas, and believe various myths, as means of making those judgements, of course, and also to exempt ourselves from any culpability or even "evil" intent. After all, we strive too hard to be like angels to ever be guilty of acting like demons. We come back as all those we judged, but we determine whether our experience in the next life will be more like heaven or hell, only by how we treat those same people today, in the here and now.   So as Jesus or Confucius might say, "Much of human suffering can be alleviated by just not being a jerk!"

Christianity is not the worship of God, it is the worship of the idea that man alone is made in the image and likeness of God. This means that humans think they are the most like God, among all species of life in this universe or any other.  And they also "believe" that thinking this way is what makes and keeps them "humble," which is like saying the kid who bragged about being better than everyone else in your 7th grade class was also the most modest - a paradox that only "Christianity" has the ability to give the "truest" explanation for; And that that "explanation," should also be accepted as "infallible" (at least by Catholics, whenever it is applied to anything having to do with "faith and morals," which pretty much covers everything anyway). Christianity, in other words, is the belief that humans alone are like God, "knowing right from wrong." Or to put it more simply, Christianity i...

The paradox of pedophilia in the Catholic Church is that Catholics think they only have the morality they use to condemn pedophilia because they are Catholics. Catholics actually "believe" they are more moral, in other words, simply because they are Catholics. But this is to assume, of course, that it may never have occurred to a single person on the planet that there was anything wrong with priests raping children, were it not for the Catholic Church's willingness to not only teach us such moral lessons, but provide us with the Eucharistic medicine needed to ward agaisnt such desires in the first place. It is to assume, in other words, that without the Catholic Church, the pedophile priest problem would be exponentially worse than it was, thank God! That their "Eucharist" clearly did nothing to prevent those Catholic priests from raping those children should never be considered evidence that such moral medicine is purely a placebo, however. On the contrary!...

When Alexander the Great once asked a pirate whom he had seized “what he meant by infesting the sea, the pirate defiantly replied ‘The same as you when you infest the whole world; but because I do it with a ship I am called a pirate, and because you do it with a great fleet you are an emperor.” ― St. Augustine, City of God (IV 4) To update St. Augustine's insight from Alexander the Great, one need only look at Bernie Madoff ; f or he was convicted of doing as an individual what the entire global economy has been "intelligently designed" to do to the whole world. But such an idea seems as implausible to the Christian as the claim their Bible is simply an autobiography of their  Devil . And this is because the Christian thinks only the universe is “intelligently designed,” while Wall Street is as random as a card game in a Las Vegas casino.

In order to understand why Jesus was put to death, and what the Last Supper truly represented, we have to start with the fact that Israel was never supposed to have a king. And to see why, we have to look at the very first experiment with monarchy,by Abimelech in Shechem.   Abimelech, who's name means "my father is king," was the son of judge Gideon and Gideon's Shechemite concubine. He would eventually claim he had inherited the right to rule over all of Shechem, much in the same way that David would claim the right to rule over all 12 Tribes, two centuries later. He is introduced in Judges 8:31 and is described as being an unprincipled, ambitious ruler, who often engaged in war with his own subjects; again, much as David and Solomon would later do.  His father, Gideon, had previously refused such a crown for precisely the same reason Samuel would later oppose kingship in general - namely, that Yahweh alone was Israel's king.    Ignoring his fat...