The Rant Institute

yesterday is a constant reminder that our tomorrow is always today

love is proof that heaven can hurt like hell

Religion is to truth what a flashlight is to the sun.

Worshiping God by crowding into a church is like celebrating life by crawling into a coffin.

In a world filled with seekers of eternal life and fame, humility comes solely from accepting our finitude and an aspiration to obscurity. By becoming man, however, God inspired humans forever after, not with an example of how to become humble, but one of only wanting to become as famous as Jesus Christ, Charles Manson, or Paris Hilton.

we are not what we see in the mirror, but what allows us to see the costume of our complexion that we confuse for ourselves.

the theist aspires to become wholly dependent upon God to conquer their fears, which only means they must become wholly dependent upon a "man of God" or a purely man made church. the atheist aspires to overcome those fears through self reliance, as Ralph Waldo Emerson explained in his most excellent essay by that same name, or to die trying. 

if Capitalism is a religion, then its Jesus Christ is Alister Crowley, and its St. Paul was Machiavelli. 

I have never had a way with words nearly as much as words have had their way with me.

standing upside down is a way of balancing the world on your head. it also makes everyone the same height.

Hemingway said he wrote to release his demons. I write so my demons will release me.

an epiphany is a chance encounter with who we really are.

Most of the time we fail to make the most of Time. And that's because we think that we are only making the most of time when we are obsessing about the future or dwelling in the past.

There are no experiments that scientists can devise to discover traits of human behavior and thinking, no matter how cruel or evil, that have not already been demonstrated by religion. The irony of this, of course, is that the "beliefs" preached every Sunday is offered as a way of keeping serial killers on a leash through the threat of hell and the bribe of heaven; and that the actions of everyone from Hitler, Stalin, Ted Bundy and Jeffery Dahmer, to Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris (of Columbine fame) could've been entirely prevented, if more people had just gone to church on Sunday.   

a writer finger paints with words

We learn the most about ourselves from those who are the least like us, and the least from those who are the most like us.

If "war is politics by other means," as Von Clauswitz famously pointed out, then maybe we should be trying to get rid of politics.

Human beings are the only animals who think of killing as both a sin and a sport.

Facebook is basically the bathroom wall of the world.

The "original sin" that the Bible accuses humanity of committing against God in the Book of Genesis, is one where Adam & Eve exercised their "free will" to pursue knowledge, agaisnt God's wishes, by eating of the fruit of the "Tree of Knowledge." This means that God had created ape like creatures in the form of humans, but commanded those creatures  - Adam & Eve - to remain more like apes than to evolve into human beings by using their "free will" to pursue knowledge. The irony being, or course, that it is the pursuit of knowledge (of God, if literally nothing else) through "free will" that Christianity champions as the one and only thing we must all do to save our sorry souls from eternal damnation. Put another way, the punishment God imposed upon humanity for its refusal to remain as dumb as apes was to give it the cross of religion, upon which we would crucify each other in our ceaseless quest to "become li...

most of our pain comes from those we define as friends, which is why Jean Paul Sartre said that hell is other people.

freedom can only come from not caring what other people think

If God is love, then the Bible is a Harlequin Romance novel written by Stephen King and the Marquee de Sade.

only someone who thinks they deserve an eternal heaven for what they believe, could believe that others deserve an eternal hell for failing to agree.

an election is when the many chose the person they want to lie to them for the benefit of the few.

the difference between a serial killer and everyone else is that the former treats his own species with the same indifference as the latter treats every other species. And one does to strangers what the other reserves for those we define as "enemies."

God can do anything. But he hasn't figured out how to text.

the difference between children and adults is that one sees us only as we want to be, and the other sees us as we are.

think outside the box, but not too far or for too long; otherwise people will just think you're a weirdo.

war is an orgy of violence gilded in valor and sold as patriotism

all power comes from our willingness to fear and hate

religion teaches us to question everything but our assumptions about our religion

some people have to work very hard to overcome the shame of thinking for themselves.

to enjoy a horror movie, you have to empathize more with the killer than the victims.

a world run by greed will one day leave us all in need.

to sacrifice possibility for security is to loose both, for the latter can only be found in the sincere pursuit of the former.

Work is what we do to fulfill other people's dreams. Play is what we do to fulfill our own.

Every new belief starts with someone who has the courage to doubt the old beliefs.

a theist is often simply a schizophrenic existentialist who would rather die as a spiritual narcissist than admit they are an atheist. 

fear is proof that you are having a new experience

We are as likely to believe that something true is a lie as we are to believe a lie is something true.

Our mind is a parent and our heart is a child. And only a child can be a true artist.

We can only ever love someone to the same degree we can love ourselves

I hope my life doesn't flash before my eyes before I die. I don't want to have to go through all of that again.

to fail is to succeed at overcoming the fear of failure

We are often our greatest blind spot, and the heaviest cross we bear.

the fool and the genius meet no where more often than in the mirror

Everything I write is a kind of love letter, sent to some anonymous admirer, who I may never meet, or who may never actually exist, who is anyone who can understand it, or at least love it. Because only by loving it, could anyone ever love somebody like me. '

I sink deeper into the recesses of my mind with every thought I fall further into the recesses of thought with every mind I tread lightly upon the sky for fear of leaving foot prints in the quicksand of time and space I whisper to the cacophony of all within their embrace only what the cacophony of all, whispers to me so why be surprised that it does not listen. for it does not listen, to what it already knows. 

Serial killers are the ethos of a culture incarnate. Sex and violence are the staple of every serial killer,  just as much as they are of our culture and our economy, our politics and our entertainment. Even Jesus being "born of a virgin" and "crucified for our sins," implies that the violence of the latter was necessary to avenge the sins related to the former, with the word "virgin" implying sex itself is a sin.  In fact, you could make the argument that God's plan to crucify Christ by having him "born of the virgin Mary," was intended as nothing but God's direct attack on Mary, since I doubt she had any idea of what she was signing up for when she agreed to be impregnated by the Holy Spirit, instead of her husband. As for Jesus, well, what God experiences inside of flesh and bone is not necessarily what we experience inside flesh and bone, and the meanings we give those experiences may be none but our own. And if we are made ...

suspended in the maelstrom of thought between the void and the all we are caught trapped in the flesh of all we are not like puppets in the maelstrom of thought We are only ever as free as our beliefs let us be for in exchange for their promise to protect us, they rob from us all we could be We are puppets of beliefs in the hands of our genes, waltzing in our mind to the music of memes.

If aliens from another planet ever showed up, we would have to explain why we put crazy people in asylums, while celebrating crazier people as religion, and appointing the craziest people of all as our leaders.

 It is said that there are " 23,145 verses in the Old Testament and 7,957 verses in the New Testament, which gives us a total of 31,102 verses in the Bible in all. DNA, on the other hand,  has "approximately 75,000,000 (75M) lines of 80 characters," of which there are "approximately 3,000,000,000 (3B) base pairs, each of which is made up of adenine (A) + thymine (T), or cytosine (C) + guanine (G) ."  Yet even though Christians all claim that "God" has written his "moral laws" on the hearts of all, we are left to wonder - if God really wanted us to "know" him through his "holy scriptures," and especially if so "knowing him" was necessary to save us from hell  -  why He did not simply include those 31,102 verses of the Bible in our DNA.   

Religion is the celebrated field of the study of “divine truth,” in which the virtue of believing something is “true” in the absence of evidence is only surpassed by the virtue of believing something is “true” in spite of the evidence. It is to claim that the problem is not the evidence, in other words, but our inability to always understand and interpret that evidence in ways that only confirm the “beliefs”  about our God and thus ourselves, that we want so desperately to be true to begin with. Every other field of human learning and understanding necessarily requires some degree of evidence to support its respective claims. Divine truth alone,  however, far exceeds, and is therefore wholly immune to, such petty human requirements.

We believe we are different races, even though genetically there is only one race,  and the fact that there are greater genetic variations within what we call a given “race” - which is a category we created which is based mostly on different skin colors - than exists between people from so called “different races.” We believe in what does not exist just as much as we deny what does.

We choose our destiny every second of every day. It’s just impossible to see if those choices will add up to be more like heaven or hell,  or if heaven and hell are simply different interpretations of the same thing, and our job is to just convince ourselves that one is the other.

Does it matter if we are the only one who thinks what we have to say is important? Answer: Yes. Why? Answer:  Because at one point, everyone thought the gods were just pissing on us, until someone dared to say "it's only rain." And they probably killed him for it.

What is universal to all humans is not reason or religions, not beliefs or ideas about morality, God, or the hereafter, or anything else. What is universal to all humans, of every time and place, are emotions. Indeed, emotions even connect us to nearly all other species of life in the world. What is universal to all humans, in other words, is our happiness and our sadness, our surprise and our disgust, our fear and our anger. Yet while these emotions are universal to all, what triggers each and every one of them is different for every single person. Or simply put, emotions are objective realities for everyone, at least on some level, while "reason" assigns emotional values that are purely subjective to each individual.  The different narratives we tell ourselves and "believe," the stories we often cling to for our sense of meaning and identity, teach us what emotional values we should assign to different ideas, and great philosophies are then created to support ...

There is something devilishly cruel about the idea that God would create humans possessed by their ideas, ideas with which they would forever war over and willingly sacrifice themselves to defend and advance. Why would an "immaterial" and infinite God create material and finite creatures (i.e. "human meat puppets") who’s sole purpose for living is to save their eternally sorry (and wholly immaterial) souls from hell, by being forced to fight with their flesh and bones, to their deaths if need be, over which of their wholly "immaterial" ideas are necessarily the "right" ones? Religions all claim that this was somehow God's "divine plan," even though not a single one of us has ever actually agreed about any of the ideas offered by any religion, at least for very long anyway, which is why we are constantly creating new ones or reinventing and reinterpreting the old ones. And this cruelty is only compounded by the fact that God, i...

Jesus was a carpenter, a man who worked with wood and thus with nature itself, who sought to destroy man made temples with the hammer of his ideas. And with that hammer, we have only ever built for ourselves ...                                                                                                        more temples.

Reducing the meaning of the universe to the bible story is like reducing the meaning of the whole Bible story to Jesus saying to his apostles “eat me.”

We are meat puppets animated by the spirit of our thoughts and ideas, which are simply words and pictures in our head, and the values we assign to them. And we love and worship our ideals like a religion and the embodiment of our god, in the hope that they will save us from those different and conflicting ideals, which we hate and fear like the devil incarnate.

The fact that we can comprehend the universe in ways that far surpass any other species of life we know of, dupes us into believing that we, at least when compared to what we call all "lower" species of intelligence, are therefore like gods in comparison. In fact, we can do pretty much everything our own gods have done, from virgin births through artificial insemination to atomic bombs and Armageddon. Our understanding of the universe sits upon our head like a crown of cognitive glory, in other words, one as immense and infinite as the universe we should be humbled to behold. But because we can't agree or even understand what "meaning" we should give this fact, we wear it like a crown of thorns. And to save ourselves, we crucify ourselves on the crosses of the meanings we give it, because our religions convince us those meanings must come from “god.”

First we discovered that light was both a wave and a particle. And if you think about it, you could say a wave is like a Liberal and a particle is like a Conservative; one is an analog and an atheist of rulers, and the other is digital and seeks to obey a god of binary rules. Then it was discovered that everything is both a wave and a particle. Most of our arguments about everything, and especially things about ourselves, are about whether we are one or the other, between people committed to believing we can be only one.

Humans think they are superior to all other animals because they have the intelligence to think that other races are inferior to their own, even though there is no biological evidence to support the "belief" that humanity is comprised of “different races” to begin with. Humans think they have a superior intelligence because they can destroy the world, in more  ways than we can count. Humans think they have a superior intelligence to all other animals, because we  talk like god when we act like the devil.

I began to loose my religion as I came to discover more and more, that fact was far stranger than fiction. For you always know how fictions are going to end, while facts have infinite possibilities.

Our past is either our worst enemy or our greatest friend, it just depends on whether we remain at war with it or learn to live with it in peace. ... Until we can love it, for everything it can teach us from our mistakes. And the only commandment there is is the one we have yet to follow,  even though it alone is the one we must follow for any hope of redemption,  which is summed up simply as “do not repeat.” The problem is that we practice repeating the past as a form of penance... Penance for daring to disobey our gods, by showing them all how willing we are to obey them now, even if we have to kill each other to prove it. And that is the basis of our morality.

Nothing fascinates me more than people, and perhaps especially people who believe in a "God." And who we are, and what we think, and who we think we are.  In this sense, maybe "people" are my God, anthropology is my theology, and science is my religion, one based on a faith in the power of doubting in everything but people.  For within the limits of every single human life, are both the scroll and span of all of human history.  

The difference between science and religion, simply put, is that the former sees the ability to change your mind about what constitutes "the truth" as a virtue, and the other sees that same ability as a vice; one sees it as absolutely essential to survival in this world, while the other sees it as the path to eternal death and damnation in the next.  Basically, this means that Christians think that all science, from anthropology to zoology and from astro physics to quantum mechanics, is either a complete lie  (which many Christians think is obvious from its over complexity), or simply mistaken to the very degree that it fails to confirm their "faith" in their God.   As such, religion fosters a kind of 'seizure of the mind,' where people come together once a week to celebrate their collective refusal to change their mind about their ideas of God, and thus their understanding of the world over all, and especially themselves.  This is like p...

What if the universe is simply God's version of a Jackson Pollock painting? And humanity is his Guernica.

Culture is a cult of common insanity preached everywhere as common sense. It is the womb we are born into, and from who’s smothering embrace we can escape only by passing through a coffin door.    Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing once pointed out that the people who are running everything - the ones we celebrate, appoint, and applaud - are responsible for far more death and suffering in the world than all the lunatics and criminals locked up around the world combined. It was that same common sense that lead 100 million men to kill each other over the course of the 20th century alone, with flags in one hand and bibles in the other. War, after all, is the highest form of humanity worshiping itself, by sacrificing itself on the altar of its ideals. .  

When you think about it all, all at once, there's no denying that it's a miracle that we are all here. And the sheer size of it all - from how we got here to who we think we are -  laughs at all attempts to describe it with words as puny as "infinite" and "eternal," or even "God." Religions want to call this "God," and describe it as a savior and a father, even though that God simply saved us from himself, and what he was going to do to us for failing to "love" him, and the right way at that. Then each tries to convince you that their brand is "the official brand" of the one and only "true" God, and that all the rest are simply knock offs from third world countries (including the same ones their own always comes from). However we got here, and whatever got us here, is at a minimum infinitely larger than all of that. All we know for the most part is that we're living inside of a kind of solar rea...

Love can level the armies of reason with a glance. And that's a good thing. Because hate has every reason in the world.

The lessons of Machiavelli’s Prince were intended as a warning but today are followed like they are the greatest advice. But this is also true of the Bible and much of history in general. 

A world that runs on money is a world that runs contrary to nature itself, for it must be "intelligently designed" with the ruthless philosophy of Machiavelli's prince, the pseudo science of Herbert Spencer's "survival of the fittest,"  and the singular ever-growing obsession for profit at all costs and above all else, by Goldman Sachs. This trinity of "wise men," it should be noted, are either works of fiction, or the sole appetite of a fictional person.  And by structuring an economy where money "trickles down" to those who have less, like manna raining down from Heaven or crumbs for Lazarus from a rich man's table  - both of which are seen to be equally "miraculous" in their respective spheres, and thus demonstrative of one's "favored" status by one god or another - we come to worship it like Yahweh, Jesus, and the golden calf. It also bedecks the world with ornamentation to hide the fact that the lap ...

Television news is basically a highly effective form of shock therapy, which is why it is so often watched while people are in bed. And religion, with the trauma of its cross and the anxiety that we may suffer a far worse fate in hell for failing to kneel before it,  is simply a socially celebrated form of PTSD.

Wanting to be famous is like volunteering to jump in front of a firing squad.

If you sit outside and listen, you can hear the argument between nature and man, and as machines groan in rhythm, and sirens scream and horns shout, nature sings a lullaby.

You can’t tell the difference between the path to heaven and the road to hell, and mostly because everything that happens on one feels exactly the same on the other. And the only difference is the meaning we choose give it, which is why we are angels to our friends, and fallen angels to our foes. For to love one thing is to hate another

Jesus was the Thomas Jefferson of the Hebrews.

Leaving the world in the hands of the economists and the financial markets is like leaving your children in the hands of your bookie and MS-13.

The worst kind of addiction is an addiction to reality. And every other addiction is simply the result of trying to escape it.

Writing a blog is like writing on a two way mirror. You have no idea who or if anyone is looking at you, and that even if they are, they’re reading everything you write the wrong way.

If we thought we were wrong about our own beliefs even half as often as we think others are wrong about theirs, the world would be twice a better place to live.

 Simply put, the constitution is the bible of an economic religion we call capitalism, and capitalism is an economic religion that convinces us that the only way we can save ourselves from becoming communists and socialists is by believing  in "the profit motive" - which Christianity more accurately calls "the love of money.” If we're all monkeys, then that's the tree, which religion calls our cross.

Time and space are like mind and body, and while time is trapped in the body of space, space is stretched out on the rack of time. Like dreams caught in a dream catcher, so we are told to believe that we are simply spirits caught in the web of a material reality.  Yet even though we strive through our religions to think of ourselves as souls, equal and undivided, we stumble blindly over our own mental constructs, which only ever lead us to categorize and rank ourselves within physical, biological, social, religious, and even financial hierarchies.   While our spirits may all be seen as equal before God, in other words, we always find new and clever ways of seeing our minds and bodies as unequal to each other; and we do this as much with our science as with our religions, and verify it all with our economics and our convictions. And in the hear and now, we experience a mere moment of an eternity which, like our souls being trapped in flesh and bone, is sim...

The great paradox of the Book of Job, that Old Testament Biblical character that God allegedly allows the devil to torment to almost no end, is that Job's friends all show up to pontificate about the reason for Job's sufferings, which no doubt only adds to his sufferings. For Job's friends, having studied their sacred scriptures as their religion requires, it is perfectly clear as to why he is suffering: Job is suffering because he has displeased God in some way. This, of course, is the very reasoning Christians give for basically all of the suffering in the world, especially their own, going all the way back to Adam and Eve. It is also why Jesus had to "suffer" for all of our sins. But when Job asks God directly as to why God is allowing him to suffer so, God deliberately responds with a vague answer, as if annoyed with Job for having the audacity to question God in the first place. God wants Job to love Him, in other words, but doesn't want Job to ask ...

When you realize that a book is simply a technology that humans created centuries ago, you realize that thinking it is "sacred" is like thinking your iPhone is sacred because of the podcast you just listened to. Christianity runs along with the progress of civilization, where first we scarified animals and drank their blood, now we can go to a grocery store, and rather than actually having to sacrifice animals or virgins to keep our God happy, we choose to just "believe" that going to mass on Sunday will suffice. The reason religion knows how easy it is to sell people "truth," is because it knows you would have to know everything to see the enormity of the lie. "God" is simply a mental designation we give for the idea that someone knows everything, and that’s why those who "believe" they know the former,  tend to think they know the latter.  

Caves appear to have always been a part of the religious idea. More than 40,000 years ago at Shanidar cave, for example, "Neanderthals interred the bodies of their beloved dead, creating a sacred space and a dwelling for the spirits." As a result, caves "then became sacred spaces where the living could receive enlightenment, as at Lascaux and Altamira."  In fact, "the cave is an important element in many religious cults. In Mayan ceremonial centers, for example, nearby caves were filled with offerings—obviously places of cult worship. At the Acropolis, the cave was a great symbol of religious enlightenment and experience." These  caves were  tombs, which begs the question of whether people thought they could gleam enlightenment from their deceased relatives or from a god or gods,  or if there was any real difference between the two. And from the caves, humanity domesticated itself into temples, and applauded itself for being humble enough to stand ...

All religions teach us to aspire to achieve the very thing that comes naturally with age. And that the we can only achieve wisdom by worshiping the wise rather than aspiring to understand how truly foolish we all really are. In this sense, sacred texts may tell us a lot less about religion, God, or Jesus than they tell us about the people who believe in religion, God, or Jesus.  

Believers basically think it's easier and smarter to simply "believe," and to try like hell to get everyone else to "believe," that our eternal soul necessarily survives death, and is judged for what it did while it remained encased in the avatar of a human meat puppet. They also think that any attempt to suggest otherwise, or even just question such a narrative at all, only ever contributes to immorality, because people then refuse to believe this, and as such, they should be punished for heresy or blasphemy. And when the atheist asks, "why not just  teach people how to accept that we have no idea what, if anything, happens after we die, and focusing instead on how we can all better learn to live together on this little rock of ours while we're alive?", the Christian replies that this would only lead to war and violence of every sort and degree. This answer makes perfect sense, of course, if you simply ignore all of recorded human history. ...