The Rant Institute

When you consider the possibility that Judas could have ended up in hell for eternity while Jesus only spent the weekend visiting the place (which is a bit like the son of Stalin visiting the gulags), and the fact that underhandedness, ruthlessness, and dishonesty are prized most in the world of business, it seems that maybe Judas was the real messiah.

The Inuit say, “Gifts make friends as surely as whips make dogs.”

From an anthropological perspective,  Claude Lévi-Strauss argues that humans tend to organize the world through ideas that constitute binary oppositions, the most crucial of which is culture and nature. These differences correlate to ideas of "good" and "bad," order vs. chaos,  clothed vs. naked, and ideas of "belief" vs. "atheism," light vs. darkness, and so on. The hard part is figuring out which of these is the true "garden of Eden," and which of these is a forgery and the cause of all of our problems.

Judging from the horrors that have been carried out in the name of Christianity over the last two thousand years, one wonders if when Jesus told Peter that he was the “rock” upon which he would build his church, he was referring to the Tarpeian Rock, which was a cliff used in Ancient Rome as an execution site, much like Golgotha. It makes sense if you think about the fact that Christians today worship the cross, which was an execution device humans used to kill their God; whom we had to kill to pay off our debt; a debt we accrued as a species through our collective disobedience. God told us not to eat an apple and was surprised when we disobeyed. God then told us not to kill, and knew we could be trusted to achieve forgiveness by murdering his only son. And this, according to Christians, was the best way God - a supremely intelligent being who with but a single thought created everything from nothing - could indirectly communicate his love and forgiveness for us, as clearly as was ...

Cultural anthropology is to humanity what theology is to God. And if we are truly "made in the image and likeness of God," then the only way to learn anything about God, is by first becoming a cultural anthropologist. In this sense, the best and perhaps only true understanding of God can only be glimpsed by us, not by focusing on the "perfect" ideal version we have in our head about that God (that theology only ever strives to defend and advance), but by first striving to see ourselves as merely a stitch in the shared fabric of humanity, stretched out across time and space, from the molecular to the mind. Those who see differences see the devil in every nook and cranny, and those who see our shared commonalities see the face of God. The serpent told Adam & Eve  that by eating the forbidden fruit they would "become like God," because the serpent knew that by "believing" they had become like God, they would forgo trying to to first  gnō...

The Bible is a book of poetry that Christians think should be read like a text book. That’s like insisting that abstract art must only ever have a single interpretation.

After seeing the picture on Facebook of the girl I had screwed over nearly two decades ago, I turned off my phone and the lights and closed my eyes, and thought about how time can talk through pictures on the wall. Back in 2001, I found myself laying on a beach in the Algarve region of Portugal, realizing I had irreconcilably sabotaged yet another relationship. But this one was different.  Sixteen years later, I was standing in an art gallery in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, and felt the past calling to me through a painting like the hand of time reaching through a wormhole.   I had flown to Rio De Janeiro with a friend who owned a condo there, in 2015. The rental company for that condo had apparently been stealing the rent money being paid by the tenant, instead of paying the mortgage.  So my friend had to fly down to sort this out. With the help of a friend he knew from Brazil, since neither he nor I spoke a lick of Portuguese at the time, he'd gone to stand in long ...

Too often the light of our accomplishments is eclipsed by the shadow of our mistakes.

There are some rather profound paradoxes at the heart of the Christian narrative. One of those paradoxes comes from the fact that it is only because Adam & Eve sought to be like God, by believing the serpent in the garden of Eden, that God would eventually become like Adam & Eve. It is a only because humanity sought to become divine, in other words, that the divine would eventually become human. It is as if God, who had destroyed humanity once before for being overly defective, had finally decided he would have to come down here and show us all how to be the kind of humans he had always hoped we would be. And in our constant striving to be like God, we killed him for failing to follow our religious rules and dogmas. Perhaps even more ironic is the fact that Christianity is a religion that calls people to be like Jesus (i.e. like God) by eating of a Jesus who hung upon a cross, in the very same  way the serpent in the Garden of Eden lured Adam & Eve to eat of th...

Through our intelligence and understanding, humans can manipulate material reality in ways that far surpass what any  other species (that we know of) can do. From splitting the atom to smashing them together, from the atom bomb to the Higgs boson, and from the Mandelbrot set to the multiverse, humanity has separated itself from all other earthly species through the power of its own mind. To all other species, therefore, we should be revered like gods. And even though we are much more like all the other species on our planet than we are like an omnipotent, omniscient, infinitely and eternally perfect, immaterial “God,” that can exist entirely outside of all time and space, we think we are all perfectly capable of understanding the mind of that God nevertheless, even though our best experts have very little understanding of the simpler minds of any of those “lesser” beings we are so much more similar to, and even less of our own. In fact, the very religions that tell us all how...

Where night dreams of day and day dreams of night do thoughts of the past and the future collide and bound in that moment between vicious tides do we drown in the screams of the day dreams of night

It is interesting to note how the evolution of human understanding about God has run in the opposite direction of the evolution of the human understanding about humanity. While religion has moved in the direction of divine unification, from polytheism to monotheism over the course of millenniums, science has largely moved in the direction of human diversification, from the human race to categories of different races, over the course of mere centuries.  The paganism and polytheism of the ancient religions saw all the forces of nature as each constituting a god. This eventually gave way to henotheism, where one god reigned supreme over all the others, as we saw with Greece and Rome, eventually giving way to the monotheism of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Our conception of space and time have followed our understanding of the cosmos as well.  First we assumed that Earth was the center of the universe, only to discover that the Sun was the center of our solar system. Then ...

America is Charles Manson dreaming he is Walt Whitman, for it acts like Julius Caesar while claiming to be Jesus Christ. 

To fail to ‘gather ye rosebuds while we may’ is a sin against time, for which the punishment to all and for all is the equality of the grave. And even the greatest kings and emperors stand powerless before the equality of the grave.

The Christian is offended by an atheist who thinks that they are smarter or better than the Christian, simply  because they have figured out that there is no God, even though the Christian believes in Christianity precisely because they think that doing so makes them smarter and more moral than the atheist.

The supreme irony of religion is that it sells salvation by first teaching us to embrace shame as a virtue, which is like teaching us to embrace the cross - an instrument of death and suffering hewn from the carcass of a dead tree - as a way of life.  We see this irony in our willingness to condemn all those who are different from ourselves, even as we ourselves feel a constant yearning to rebel against the ever creeping suffocation of conformity. We build our prisons, which lure us everywhere to obey, submit, and conform, to protect ourselves from that which we are taught to fear. And out of an abiding love for that fear, with songs of rejoicing in our hearts and freedom on our lips, we lock ourselves inside.  It is the irony of worshiping the very God who flung us all into this temporary world of ours, brimming with chaos, violence, and contradiction, as the only one who can save us all from just such a world. Indeed, it is to argue that man has free wi...

In a world where fear trumps love, every reason for love becomes an even stronger reason to hate. And the opposite would be just as true. We often love the thing we hate just as much as we hate the thing we love. 

The fact that Jesus was a carpenter who was crucified on a cross, which was something that had to be designed and built by a carpenter like himself, reflects not only how much the suffering in our lives is largely the result of our own labors, but also how much all the problems in a society at large are the result of what that society strives only ever harder to create. It is America, as Eisenhower put it, "hanging from a cross of iron."  Or to put it another way, we worship the things that kill us, because the things that kill us are the things we alone create.

It is said that the writer writes what other people are thinking but have failed to articulate.  I would say the writer writes what people are taught everywhere to deny, or try their earnest not to think about let alone consider, and that which they know in their heart and soul is undoubtedly true. For what is undoubtedly true is that all we would ever want for ourselves, is no less than what we should ever want for all. But even our language works to knit us into the cocoon of a false perspective, one that can only imagine things in the shape of how we are so often taught to articulate them, which works to sew us up in a story that seduces us like the Siren's song. Like a child lulled to sleep at their mother's breast by her rhythmic breath and beating heart, so the repetition of sacred rituals lulls us to sleep like Rip Van Winkle, with the cadence of the lies we tell ourselves because we want them so much to be true.    All forms of slavery begin with ...

Curing addiction by locking a person in prison is like trying to fix your car by locking it in a garage.

Catholics believe that everyone is born with the stain of original sin. They also claim that all life is a gift from god. Hence, life is like a fruit basket from god, but with a rotten apple at the bottom of the basket. And the only way to make sure that rotten apple won’t spoil the rest of the fruit is to water board the entire basket. This water boarding comes in the form of baptism. Baptism is a “sacrament” that Christians believe washes away the stain of original sin, which is said to afflict every human soul since Adam & Eve allowed their curiosity to kill not just the cat, but humanity overall. Catholics use the water boarding of baptism on infants to wash away that pesky stain, while other Christian denominations require that a person make a conscious choice to be baptized first (however uninformed or misinformed about the religion they are being baptized into they may be). The reason Catholics do this is because, since the child knows nothing of the sin that God al...

People in the rear view mirror of history always look different than they did when they were standing in the headlights of their own time. And because they do, it is always the very same people who are always looking back and applauding the one, who are also driving the train that is always running over the other. That’s why the Christians are always the ones who crucify every other Christ God sends them, because they are convinced that there can be only one, and all the rest are simply heretics. How ironic.

The Bible explains that God created the world in six days, and on the seventh day he rested (although it never explained why an all powerful being would need to "rest" ). On the eighth day, God decided to write a book about it all.  And on the ninth, he decided to create 6000 vastly different languages,  of which only 200 are actually written languages, the many of which have wildly varied grammatical structures and words that are without synonymous equal,  and vested his sacred church - a church that has just as hard a time ferreting out child molesters among its ranks as the public school system -  with being able to make sure everyone gets it right, forever! And on the tenth day, God said, " There! Now they shouldn't have any problem understanding that." Then Jesus asked, "But what if they do?" To which God replied, "Then I suppose I will cast them into a lake of fire for all eternity for being so stupid, unless they grovel...

For the Bible to have been inerrantly transcribed and translated, we must assume both that every person who ever made a copy was an expert in linguistics, and that everyone of those experts in linguists unanimously agreed on the very same interpretation over the last 2000 years, even if they had used any number of different methods to do so. In fact, even the original authors of the books of the New Testament would have had to have been experts in both Aramaic, which was the only language the Apostles spoke, and in that dialect of Aramaic that was particular to the poor and the illiterate, since that was what the Apostles were. They would also have had to have been experts in Greek as well, since that is the language in which the books of the New Testament were originally written.  Worse still, those learned Greek authors would have had to capture in those stories the aching sense of injustice that is felt so acutely by only the poorest of the poor, in all of its unlettered...

Both economics and religion claim we are all born naturally selfish and greedy. The difference is that one says we can only save our souls from eternal damnation by overcoming these vices, and the other says we can only save our economy by doing everything we can to encourage them.   Thus, selfishness and greed are the sole "belief" that our entire economy is built and runs on, which is a belief held religiously by economists, who are the priests of any given economic religion.  But when such a "belief" is the very soul of an economy, everything in that economy will necessarily be "intelligently designed" to maximize profits accordingly.  And that means that the only way to maximize profits is to find ever more clever ways of manufacturing feelings of selfishness and greed through consumption, and then using the results that such 'clever  manipulations' are alone responsible for manufacturing, as proof of how right you were to ...

To oppose both abortion and contraception, as too may Christians do, is like opposing both guns and bullet proof vests. It is this kind of thinking that leads people like Mother Theresa to refuse to allow the distribution of condoms even in places where the AIDS virus is spreading like a religion.

When you cut down a tree and fashion it into a cross you murder something that was given life by God to worship an instrument of torture that was ultimately used to murder that same God.  And the the people who have done this around the world for the last 2000 years, are convinced that they need to do this to show that God just how much they love him, for having the decency to come down to earth as simply a man, so we could save our own sorry asses from hell by murdering him with it. Yeah, that makes sense.

The fact that the Supreme Court recently ruled that employees will have to agree to arbitration agreements with their employers, and that South Carolina just recently passed a law that said that any criticism of Israel is now outlawed as "anti-Semitic," makes it all the easier to see how our institutions - which are legal "persons" that may never die - see all of humanity the same way Christopher Columbus saw the Native Americans. Our institutions, in other words, have become our only Gods, and they treat the vast majority of humanity as their food and their slaves, while convincing us that they are really giving us freedom and salvation.  And they do all of that, by promising us heaven while they turn most of the planet into hell, and convincing us we are saints when most we play the devil.

Hell is to be cursed with a linear mind while being trapped in a non-linear world, and surrounded by people who are all convinced that despite this difference, they have used the one to successfully decipher the meaning of the other. It is precisely this difference, however, that serves as the fatal flaw to all true understanding. For the bedrock of all opinion and "belief," all religions and ideas, is an infinite amount of ignorance that we are forced of necessity to always minimize or simply deny, so that we may focus instead on the few ambiguous pieces of information that we are as confident as the pope, will grant us a near infallible understanding of all we survey, and especially the divine mind of God. And any attempt to point this out to all those who depend on their ideas to define their identity is to be as cursed as Sisyphus climbing Golgotha.  

Religions all work the same way, regardless of whether those religions are political, economic, theistic, financial, or pseudo scientific. They offer a solution, and then work like hell to create the problem. 

Every Sunday, people around the world migrate reflexively to churches, temples, and mosques, as much to celebrate their own enlightened ideas as to bemoan the habitual ignorance of the human herd.   And in the slavish routines, rituals, and habits that our various religions of god, money, and power have only designed and addicted us too, we applaud how much our lives resemble that of the pack mule, while we criticize all those who embrace the improvisation of life as a bunch of lazy savages. . For only when we are surrounded by the security of those who are most likely to think like ourselves, do we feel comfortable enough to point out the idiocy of other people's ideas, and confident enough that no one will point out the idiocy of our own.    Such people are often far more interested in proving they are right, then they are in caring if they are correct. For them, courage is best demonstrated by their willingness to die for their sacred gods, beliefs,...

All theistic religions use God to sell us rules, even though they have never bothered to show that there is any actual relation between the two. But by seducing people with the "belief" that the two are inseparable if not simply the same,  the love of the former is used to manufacture hatred of all those who refuse to follow the latter.

Society is to human freedom what the zoo and the farm are to animal rights.

The difference between the theist and the atheist is that the former seeks to honor the dead by repeating their mistakes, while the latter seeks to do the same thing by daring to make their own.

Perhaps the most salient part of the New Testament for Christians is the fact that Jesus rose from the dead after being brutally murdered for daring to challenge the "holy" power and authority of the Sanhedrin.  But there is absolutely nothing "amazing" about the resurrection, if Jesus was in fact an eternal God.  Think of it this way: to say that Jesus was just as much God as he was human, is like saying I am just as much a human being as I am a car owner. For God, in other words, the physical human body of Jesus was simply the vehicle he was driving around while on earth.   To God, then, destroying the physical human "vehicle" that was the earthly body of Jesus would be like someone destroying my car. And while the destruction of my car impairs my ability to drive around town, it has no effect on me as a person. So to, then, would the destruction of the physical body of Jesus have absolutely no effect on an eternal, infinite, immaterial God....

All religions are intrinsically evil and immoral, whether they are theistic, financial, economic, political, pseudo-scientific, and so on. And they are intrinsically evil and immoral because they knowingly and intentionally conflate their "beliefs" with the "truth," even though even a ten year old knows the difference between the two. In fact, the reason religions require that people come to church every week and read their Bibles every day, or sing national anthems every morning, is simply to keep them hypnotized by the illusion that the two are the same thing. Because only after you convince people that "beliefs" and "truth" are really the same thing, can religions then be used to convince them to engage in all the most immoral acts for all of the most moral reasons. And in this way, all religions masquerade as the antidote to themselves, and each other.     

We lock ourselves inside of office buildings and churches, in the worship of god and money, and hide from the Sun that seeks only to share its warmth and the breeze that wishes only to share its gentle caresses, like Adam & Eve hid from God after they had sinned against him. We hang on our walls motivational quotes that inspire us to work only all the harder, over a picture of a landscape that looks like the heaven we believe we are working so hard to reach, even though it is right outside our window.      During the middle paleolithic era,  we used to draw animals on the walls of caves.   Now we paint images of a "God" - who always only ever looks exactly like ourselves - on the walls of churches; hang pictures of our idols in our offices, our malls, and our homes; and plaster digital images of ourselves like a stark raving Narcissus, all over the walls of our cyber caves.  We hide from God by joining religions that convince us they alone can h...

In 1917, 50,000 people were said to have seen the "miracle of the dancing Sun," in Fatima, Portugal. Catholics not only accept that this "miracle" must be true, but that it proves their claims about God as much as the legitimacy of their Catholicism. But the miracle of the dancing sun is not the fact that 50,000 people, "who claimed to have witnessed extraordinary solar activity, such as the sun appearing to "dance" or zig-zag in the sky, careen towards the earth, or emit multicolored light and radiant colors. According to these reports, the event lasted approximately ten minutes." Instead, the real "miracle" is that no one else on earth apparently noticed it. This, then, illustrates how lopsided God is, since he shows such a "miracle" to such a select few people in Fatima, while hiding it from being seen by the billions of other people around the world.

The hardest thing to do is listen to our self rather than listening to our fears, especially when we are taught our whole lives to listen first, and mostly, to our fears. Our fears are  not us, however, they are only implanted in us by others who consume them, and in whom they grow like cancer. And those fears are consumed and grow in us like a cancer, because by the miraculous power of religion, hate becomes indistinguishable from love. Love, in other words, is simply the inversion of hate. 

Our religions and our culture tell us only that we are never good enough, and keep us in a perennial state of insecurity, in both our quest for heaven and a good paying job that won’t be exported to China next year, in order to turn lower wages and longer hours into bigger profits. And both sell us the same solution to the perennial feelings of inadequacy that they alone are responsible for creating. That solution is to consume, the lord their god on Sunday, and everything else the rest of the week. The only solutions both really offer, however, is to convince people the they alone are the real problem.  And as you can see from the throngs of people who rush off to church and shopping malls every weekend, we not only believe it, we can’t help but eat it up!

If man is made in the image and likeness of God, than God is mud. And mud spelled backwards is dumb.

What if all disease - both mental and physical - is caused by fear?  And what if all fear masquerades as love? And what if all love is simply the result of what we choose to see, in either a person or an idea; who or what we choose to let in; and with whom we can stand with a stark naked soul and be unafraid?

Just like Jesus, Julius Caesar was seen by many people as being a god when he was alive, and by even more people after he died.   After he dies in 44 BC, Julius Caesar is also deified as a God by the Roman Senate. And the people had heavenly proof  of the validity of this, which combined the 8 days of light celebrated in Hanukkah  with the star of Bethlehem that hung in the sky like the crown jewel of Christmas.  At the the first games - which were given on the anniversary of the deification of Julius by his heir Augustus - a comet shown, appearing around the 11th hour for 7 days in succession, and it was believed that this comet was the soul of Caesar which had ascended into heaven.  Such a "divine" heavenly sign proved that if there is only "one God," then what the vast majority of Romans referred to as Julius Caesar, a heretical sect of Judaism referred to as "Jesus Christ," with the latter having ascended into the heavenly realm less than...

The slave is a coffin unto himself. And we are all slaves. And when you are a slave, you are only awake when you are asleep. Because every day we wake up, we hold a wake for our dreams.

The difference between philosophy and religion is the difference between Marcus Aurelius and Joseph Stalin. And as the former seeks to blaze a path to enlightenment through skepticism and doubt - which philosophy applauded as much in Renee Descartes as religion had condemned in the French theologian Peter Abelard -    the other paves the road to hell with the bones of all those who refuse to believe. 

Teaching people they need to pray to God for things is to teach people that a God who could create the entire universe from nothing, by simply giving it a thought, is powerless to do anything in the world unless enough people pray for him to do it. This is like Superman deciding he will only save Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen from some life threatening peril they managed to get themselves into, if enough people talk about what a "super" guy he really is, and specifically on behalf of Lois and Jimmy - since that is what it basically means to "pray" for someone. And since people are all praying to God for different and often opposite things, religion sells humanity the idea that it is forever locked in am epic tug-of-war between good and evil, and God is the rope. The only problem with this kind of thinking, however, is that the rope is suspended over a volcano. And with our denials and accusations, we only work to pull each other in. As the saying goes, give peop...

if only we could forgive those who trespass against us as easily as we forget our trespasses against others; if only we could defend our enemies with even half the passion with which we deny our own guilt if only salvation rested in each other, instead of profit margins and other religions that force us to war evermore with ourselves if only we believed in each other half as much as we believe in our religions, our gods, our leaders and even in money itself,  if only... 

One day you wake up to discover you're locked inside the trunk of a car you've been driving around inside of your head with no destination in mind, watching life go by through the hole of a punched out tail light.    Then you throw off the burial should of last night's hangover, only to find yourself staring down the barrel of a gun that's half a century long and growing, and wondering when fate would finally pull the trigger, or if life would bully you into one day having to do it yourself. Each of us is born with a contract on our head, after all, but most of us never know when and where the hit-man cometh, or what his weapon of choice will be.  Time tightens around your neck like a noose, and each tick of the clock echoes in your ear like a deadbolt lock through an empty prison. And as you stumble to greet the growing stranger in the mirror once again, five decades step out of a blind alley and clobber you over the head with a crowbar, and...

What the serpent does to Adam is the same thing God does to Jesus. All human sin, in other words, was inflicted upon humanity by the devil’s deception of Adam  and Eve. God then showed us how much he allegedly “loves” us, by inflicting those sins onto Jesus (i. e., himself) in order to forgive us for being deceived by those rebel angels who ultimately rejected god as a tyrannical perfectionist. But the fact that god felt the need to kill himself, as a sacrifice to himself,  for how easily the fallible humans he created could be manipulated by the fallen angels he had created, should tell us everything we need to know about just how “infallible” god really is.

The Christian believes that the natural, material, clock-like universe, is proof of the existence of a supernatural, immaterial, watchmaker. And the only thing that stops that watchmaker from simply throwing the universes he "intelligently designs" into the furnace (for being as defective as only such a divine "intelligence" could possibly "design"), are the prayers and supplications of Christians, who all reside on a remote planet in an infinite universe, and whose entire species has existed for but a single moment of eternity.

When I think about Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernake, who's religious devotion to "no regulation" allowed the financial institutions to swindle the country out of hundreds of billions of dollars,  I can't determine if they are both simply "true believers" in the religion of "no regulation," or if they are simply pretending to be, in order to fool enough of the audience to let them stay in power. But I guess that's true of all religions.

We think of time in circles, we think of space in squares. And we are forever trying to force the one into the other. We count our hours and years by our journey around the sun, which even though it feels  perfectly stable and fixed in our sky, is actually hurling through space like a runaway horse, and wholly ignorant of the fact that it is dragging us along with it. We build boxes with our ideas, just as much as with our homes, our cubicles, our prison cells, our yards, our world, our coffins.   But we pray to our Gods, convinced that our outpouring of love for them on a weekly basis is what surely keeps everything from falling to pieces (regardless of how we might behave during the rest of the week). And by this thinking, all those who refuse to do the same thing are basically threatening the delicate cosmological balance of our very galaxy! "Pass the collection plate, please!"

Religion teaches us that we can only ever learn to love each other like a family of god, by first accepting that we are all complicit in murdering god. It just so happens that the god we murdered was the one who was trying to teach us how to love each other like his family, which also just happens to be the very reason we are said to have crucified Him in the first place. And when you consider that said "god" is alleged to have sent his only son to earth to be slaughtered by humans in an act of sacrificial crucifixion, humanity has proven to be remarkably dependable when it comes to committing murder when god most wants us to. For the Christian, only by first accepting that we have God's blood on our collective hands (which is simply the inevitable result of having to kill a god to be forgiven for an act of disobedience, in some ancient Amazonian Eden somewhere, by Adam & Eve), can we ever hope to love each other like a family of said "God." And peo...

Modern society is a prison of the mind, segregated by walls of time and bars of beliefs, graffitied over with false symbols, which we are taught to love and worship like gods.  It is a man made square, a crowning achievement of our intelligence and proof that we alone must be made "in the image and likeness of God;" a square, that we struggle with only ever more to fit inside the circle of life.  And we are all forced to wear this collective madness we hail everywhere as "progress," like a crown of thorns, which is why we crucify everything else, and even ourselves for it.  And everywhere we encounter another problem in this Sisyphean task, rather than understand the message the world is beating us over the head with like a bible of biological truths, we defend the prison we have complicity built for ourselves instead, while only ever blaming the circle of life for failing to be a square. 

If Jesus Christ had shown up in the world today rather than two thousand years ago, there is a very good chance he'd take a look around, and wonder if humanity was even worth saving at all. Would he conclude that we are all so intoxicated with our own "progress" that we cannot see how the glittering new tomorrow we are all working so hard to create, is actually the monster that is devouring us all? Would he find a world where people had learned how to work better together, or a world run by people who think that selling their souls is a small price to pay to gain the whole world? And they are willing to murder us all to prove it. Would he marvel at our ability to live in peace, or our ability to scourge and crucify each other with everything from our words to our wars? Would he say we had gotten better at learning to love or to hate? Would he ask “what if all the money spent on wars and prisons over the 20th century alone, had been spent instead on fo...

On the whole, corporations and financial institutions simply prey upon humanity in the very same way that humanity  preys upon every other species, and even the planet itself. The difference, however, is that the former preys upon humanity by convincing or forcing humanity to prey upon itself, and always for the noblest reasons, much to the enrichment of the few. If corporations and financial institutions were a football player, in other words, they'd be Michael Vick, and we're the dogs. 

If you want to learn about God, study nature. If you want to learn about the devil, study man. And if you want to learn about how the latter does its worst simply by “believing” that it alone was like the former, study religion. Baptism is the sacrament of brainwashing, after all,  where infants are waterboarded to wash away their sins, the same way God washed away sinners from the earth in the days of Noah.

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,  To entertain these fair well-spoken days, I am determined to prove a villain And hate the idle pleasures of these days.  - Richard III To believe that we alone are made in the image and likeness of God is to believe that humanity is "special" because we are basically a freak of nature. And if you consider the Earth to be an organism, that we are living off of parasitically at a far greater rate than everything else combined, then climate change is simply that organism's way of fighting off a virus by raising its temperature. Or to put it another way, if all of the species of life were represented as characters from Shakespeare, humanity would be Richard III.

Only with the aid of an economic religion, one usually bolstered and grounded in a theistic religion, can you get a majority of people to hate the poor for doing the very same thing they love the rich for doing, for both are simply taking every advantage of the system that they can, only one does it through charity and the other through bribery. And as we hate the one for playing to our sympathies, we love the other for preying upon our gullibility.

I flew to a wedding in Mexico a few years ago, and stayed at a swank and fancy resort for several days. We drank and laughed and enjoyed ourselves, as we celebrated the festivities. And as we sat down to eat an elaborate dinner one night, for all of our meals were both included and sumptuous, suddenly we had discovered that the waitress had failed to provide a steak knife for one of the place settings at our table. The rebukes of that waitress by some of the people at my table soon followed. Mere moments before this discovery by the people at my table, however, I had watched the face of that waitress turn to horror as she had discovered the very same thing for herself. And doing so, she rushed off (presumably) to retrieve one. And as a couple of people at my table took turns burning the effigy of this waitress with their words, I began to write on my napkin, the way I imagined Henri Toulouse Lautrec would begin to sketch with his pencil, while sitting in a crowded ...

careful, for one day you may become what you hate

The first thing you have to do before you can convince some people that others should live in poverty, is convert them all to a religion that considers poverty to be a virtue.  Modern Christianity is about selling the "belief" that the poor are more dishonest than the rich, and that with the accumulation of wealth comes an equal share of benevolence, that can only be spread to the many who are called, because it was imparted by the "invisible hand" of economics on the chosen few.  In this sense, human progress has largely been defined by economists as a "decrease in poverty," however relative such an idea may be. But to me it is defined by how much humanity has overcome its collective worship of various fears and fictions. And much of human history has been a contest, almost like an angry dance, between these two opposing ideas. 

A miracle is something God does for those who cannot afford the price being charged for it in the for profit system. It's like a lottery, where God works pro bono. The point, of course, is that God would never work pro bono for a system he did not approve of. 

Maybe the only reason an immaterial God made material man is so that man could make up God’s mind for him. That “mind” is A. I. of course. But the morality of this God, which man is building with his technology, will be the morality of the financial markets and the military industrial complex, which is the very same morality that the God of the Old Testament was so acutely afflicted with.

Brilliance and madness are oft defined by the victors, and those who are the one today, are considered the other tomorrow. And every generation is equally sure they've finally got it right, even though the future has always proved everyone equally wrong.

We eat God. This was the idea that occurred to me when, as a child, I received my first “Holy Communion” in the Catholic Church. For Catholics, transubstantiation means they are actually eating Jesus’s flesh and drinking his actual blood, as if their “Eucharist” convinces Catholics that they can only hope to be moral by acting like both a cannibal and a vampire at least once a week. God, in this respect, is the first amphetamine, and the first opioid, which is why both are legal and fed to us like water. It is also why psychedelics are illegal, lest we discover that the universe works in the same way as our own mind.

I love to sit at the intersection of 10,000 universes, where the tranquil chorus of creatures in every tree, convulse with all the improvisation of jazz and the eloquence of the sacred story of life, and sing to the percussion of a bustling city far beyond,  and drink in the night through my ears. And as I listen to this nocturnal fugue between nature and man, I marvel at the almost incurable distance that has grown between the nature of life and the artifices of living, thanks to man and his clever ideas. And as we climb over each other, and the dead, striving after the latter, I revel with those more enlightened species who now serenade me, with a sense of reverence for the former.  “We are all down here in the gutter,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “but some of us are looking at the stars.”

Power feeds upon itself, swallowing up people in the process. In many ways, it is the very sin that is said to have corrupted Adam & Eve, in the metaphorical fruit that would make them "like God," which represented the fruit of power. It is also what Lucifer is said to have tried to bride Jesus with in the desert. Power moralizes the very worst of horrors, lies,and actions, whenever they are performed in the service of power. Power does, however, offer up a few of its sons for sacrificial crucifixion every now and then, like it did with Abu Ghraib and Richard Nixon  (Watergate being almost like "divine intervention" by helping to divert the people's attention from the Pentagon Papers and COINTELPRO). It does this as a way of "cleansing its soul," in order to maintain the illusion of a moral superstructure, where truth always triumphs over evil, in a world where the exact opposite is "true."    Humans have always sought a Jesus Ch...

When I say I "found God," I mean to say I found the closest thing on Earth that any human being can even begin to compare to a God of "love." That "God" is utter love, devoid of all judgement or criticism, and sees only the purest essence of a person, what a "theist" might refer to as a "soul." That "God" is captured in perhaps no living thing better than a dog. I have always been struck by the nature with which a dog loves its owner, or even people in general, without the slightest care of their religious beliefs, political ideology, nationality or race, gender, sexual orientation, age, height, weight, you name it! And yet, from the most rabid of believers to those who use their "beliefs" to make their decisions for them, people convince themselves (with a great deal of help from one church or another) that the "love of God" is not necessarily and always like the love of a dog; a conclusion I flatly reje...