The Rant Institute

Most of the people who are responsible for all of the problems in the world are convinced that they are the only solution.

Charlatans have always used love to spread hate, and the desire to do good to commit unspeakable evil. In the 21st century, there has been a reversal of that maxim from Edmund Burke. Because today, evil triumphs far more when many a good men believe they are doing good, than when good men do nothing.

Tomorrow is always waiting on us, and in more ways than one. We conspicuously consume resources that our children's children may one day need to survive, confident that they'll figure out how to live without them, and hopefully they'll do so with much less bloodshed than we've invested to keep them. And we do this, while inconspicuously too many of us try not to choke on our pride for surrendering our responsibility to do anything about it. We are the 38 bystanders who watched a psychopath brutally slice Kitty Genovese to death in 1964, who did little more than yell about it in their own living rooms, much as we all do, parked in front of our screen as we are, but not one of them was bothered enough by what they watched out their window that March 13th, at 3 a.m., to call the police.  And our window is our screens, which is also a mirror of us.  And when you consider that studies have shown that an inordinate number of the top people people running everything ar...

The only thing harder than finding the truth in a world overwhelmingly addicted to lies is deciding whether to share it, especially when everyone who has ever tried to do the same thing has only been crucified for doing so. And in every age, it has always been the most religious who end up screaming "crucify him!" the loudest.

"Religious freedom" is an oxymoron.

The only reason religions all work to convince human beings that we are intelligent enough to understand an infinite God is to convince us we are not stupid enough to be enslaved by anyone who tries to convince us they know more about that "infinite" God than we do.

Even if there isn’t a secret cabal like the  Freemasons or the Illuminati running the world for their own gain, regardless of the misery it may produce for anyone else, it is a far saner thing to believe that there is than that a mythical devil and his minions are tempting souls to commit evil so the loving creator of those souls will throw them all into an eternal hell. I mean, hell isn't like a normal incinerator that a carpenter might pitch a flawed piece of wood into, it’s one where that flawed piece of wood suffers in those flames for all eternity,  for this is precisely what the Christian God thinks Pinocchio deserves for bearing false witness, and nothing less.

In Lies My Teacher Told Me, James W. Loewen writes the following: "Historians have chronicled the rise of racism in the West. Before the 1450s Europeans considered Africans exotic but not necessarily inferior. As more and more nations joined the slave trade, Europeans came to characterize Africans as stupid, backward, and uncivilized. Amnesia set in: Europe gradually found it convenient to forget that Moors from Africa had brought to Spain and Italy much of the learning that led to the Renaissance. Europeans had known that Timbuctu, with its renowned university and library, was a center learning. Now, forgetting Timbuctu, Europe and European Americans perceived Africa as the "dark continent." By the 1850s many white Americans, including some Northerners, claimed that black people were so hopelessly inferior that slavery was a proper form of education for them; it also removed them physically from the alleged barbarism of the "dark continent." This reve...

While everyone ages, some people actually grow.

Fear is often associated with being a bad thing. And it certainly tends to be. But sometimes some kinds of fear can be a really good thing, because they let you know you’re alive.

We either love God and fear the devil or hate God and love the devil. But none of us can be trusted to tell the difference, because it’s pretty obvious there isn’t any.

What if one day in the future, all of the books in the world are gone, and the only thing people learn from about history are the movies? Think about the difference between the past we know and the past we depict in our movies. How do we know the same contrast doesn’t exist between the purely oral traditions that were handed down for  tens of thousands of years, and the writing of books, and especially a book like the Bible?

Religion does not teach people to be honest,  it only teaches people how to lie. And it does this by teaching people they should all be ashamed of themselves for being born sinners, and acting like it, unless they have accepted into their sinful souls the very Jesus who died because we are all born sinners; in which case everything we do is forgivable, because we are always doing it for god. Or to put it another way, Christianity teaches you to crucify your own truth, whenever it fails to conform to the one defined for us as “God’s,” by those we think we should trust and obey, because they assure us they speak for God, even if some of God’s priests are some of the greatest sinners in the world - which they again assure us is to be expected, since we are all born sinners. That Christianity doesn’t even succeed at curing Christians of their sinful nature, however, isn’t something anyone should ever hold against God; or even Christianity.

The Christian question comes down to whether we should base our morality and our entire life on the interpretation of the most murderous book in human history, in order to save our own soul from hell by pretending to have the moral authority to tell everyone else how to live to save their souls, or whether doing such a thing is simply our desire to assert some power and control over others, while always being able to defer the responsibility for doing so to our imaginary friend we call “Jesus” (who’s blood we drink every Sunday and who’s execution device we wear as a gold ornament around our neck)?

In a world that runs on lies, the search for truth is a suicidal tendency.

It is impossible to have an honest conversation about "truth" with people who have a religious obligation to lie to themselves about their "god." This is because they are convinced on a deeply emotional level that the greatest "truth" of all is the one held not only without any evidence, but despite it. This belief then inverts all moral ideas of "truth" by elevating their mere "beliefs" to the level of ultimate "truth" while demoting any and all other attempts to find actual truth as necessarily being a lie. And it is with this inverted system of "beliefs," one that necessarily requires people to accept a sacred time honored lie as the ultimate "truth," that the "believer" fashions their morality and crucifies all those who fail to kneel before it. And for no other reason than that the "believer" cannot believe they could ever be wrong. We see a perfect example of this in the ...

Perhaps every belief we have, especially beliefs we have about power, god, and money, are mere denials of a reality that we are either unable  or unwilling to accept. Indeed, people would rather kill and die, even though doing so makes an utter mockery of their god, their beliefs, and their morality,  than accept for a single solitary moment that they could ever be wrong about their sacred beliefs. Our only true God, in other words, is whatever lie we convince ourselves we must “believe” is the “truth.” And that’s because the actual truth is far to great a cross to carry;  which is why we have always crucified anyone who dares to speak it.

The reason we are all born with the stain of original sin is not because Adam and Eve disobeyed God,  but because originally Christianity had decided that sex itself was a sin, one for which god could forgive only because he could use the fruit of that sin to create the “gift” of life (although thanks mostly to Christianity, most people would describe such a gift as more of a curse). We are all “born” with the stain of original sin, in short, because Christianity originally saw sex itself as the sin from which all life necessarily originates. This is why Jesus had to be born a virgin, and why his conception without the physical act of coitus was necessary to ensure that he was born without the stain of “original sin” like everyone else. It is also why Mary had to remain “ever virgin,” lest should would never have been save from the clutches of death and allowed to ascend bodily into heaven. Unlike the rest of us, Jesus is “believed” not to have originated from sex, but from a g...

Jesus came to Jerusalem for Passover because Jerusalem was the new Egypt, and Jesus was the new Moses. And Jesus did not die to forgive the sins of the world, but for the sin of Christianity. For Christianity is incapable of self criticism, and the proud boasts of "infallibility" it makes in the name of "humility," nail its understanding of everything to the cross of its child like conviction, and everywhere labors to imprison the mind of humanity in the name of "freedom."   

Seeking affirmation through the approval of others is to derive all of your own  sense of value from those who's opinions we should value least of all, while altogether devaluing our own opinion, even though we are the only one who knows the whole story of who we really are, and why.

To devote oneself to "believing" that God is all love and mercy, when the book you believe is his inerrant message to man is by far the bloodiest tome in all of human history, is like believing that Mien Kampf proves Adolf Hitler is the Easter bunny. This refusal to accept that God murdering everyone on the planet makes him guilty of far more death and suffering than humans have ever aspired to visit upon themselves, illustrates just how strongly Christians are willing to use their "faith" to bend reality into whatever it is they want - into whatever "belief" they want - regardless of the universe of evidence to the contrary staring them in the face.

God is the monster of our morality, which is why we so often act like perfect monsters when we think we are being as moral as we think god requires us to be.  Indeed, how can it be moral to train children to be as obedient as a dog by threatening to throw them into a volcano? For that is exactly what Christianity believes is the necessary basis for all morality, even though it is itself perhaps the greatest immorality imaginable - just not to Christians apparently.

Passion is a form of curiosity, and curiosity is a form of passion.

Christianity teaches you to love people for who they are, but only if they are willing to become who Christianity says they should be.

What if time and space are an organism, that divides and replicates like a cell, that lives in the bowls of gravity? And everything it digests, becomes its energy?

“You’re always haunted by the idea you’re wasting your life.” — Chuck Palahniuk

The welfare that Socialism provides for the poor is nothing compared to the welfare that Capitalism provides for the rich. If the former gives away a bottle of water, the latter gives away the oceans for the richest of all to do with as they wish.

Freedom has always been strangled  by the hands of fear.

Everything Christians fear Muslims are going to do to America, Christians have already done to America a thousand times over.

God does not “exist,”at least not in any sense of the word “exist” that we could mean anyway,  because he preceded and is alleged to have created all of existence itself, from absolutely nothing. Yet Christians argue that a perfect being would have to be a being that actually exists (because a being that doesn’t exist would be less perfect than one that does), while at the same time arguing that god is not a material being, which is why science will never find him no matter how hard it tries. This then is the mind - body problem of god. Our mind is immaterial, but has a material brain from which it emanates and through which it operates. But god is said to be purely an intelligence that “designed” existence and everything in it.  God then wrote a book about it, according to Christians, that was worse than anything ever written by Stephen King, where he tells us nothing about how he did this or why, but only about how he sent his son to us to murder, to forgive ...

The only true Christian martyrs and saints are all those who were murdered as heretics or savages by Christians for Christianity. What is really scary when you think about it, however, is how many of the descendants of those who were murdered by Christians for Christianity have themselves become some of the most ardent believers in the religion that was used to justify the torture, enslavement, and murder of their ancestors.

Religion is an invitation for people to lie to themselves about where they think their morality, and worse their “moral authority” (by which they really mean their “moral superiority”) comes from,  and to feel good about yourself for doing so. This belief that “god” is their moral authority, is as strong as their own desire to control people, and always only for the best of reasons. It is also as strong as their refusal to accept that an individuals life may be finite, which is why they war so ferociously against any such claims,  and why they suffer from a chronic dependence on the mere “belief” that they will live forever for simply “believing” that they deserve to.

I suppose we all have a message to deliver, and a story to share, even if no one is listening, and nobody cares.

Your society values people for how much they have, ours for how much they give away. — Sitting Bull

The clearer understanding of reality you have, the more psychotic others will think you to be.

To love Jesus is to hate yourself for contributing to his suffering and death for failing to measure up to the son of god.

What the Christian fails to understand is that, to the atheist, Christians all look the same. Christians often claim that this is untrue,  but even if it is,  the very point of Christianity is make it come true, by convincing people that “truth” requires each of them to “fake it til you make it” come true.

My curiosity I used to think My curiosity was a form of mental cancer, a learning addiction that was swallowing up all my mental energy, and sabotaging everything else I was trying to be, that I never really wanted to be anyway. But now I think maybe it was the chemo therapy I needed to a eradicate the fears we are immersed in, like frogs in boiling water, so i could finally do whatever it was I always wanted to do. Because if everything you’ve learned up this this point isn’t enough to convince you to try to follow that dream, then nothing ever will be. Damn the torpedoes ...

You can find yourself asking yourself why are you questioning a decision you have to make, and even questioning why you are asking yourself such a question, and be unsure if the answer isn’t because you’re intuition is trying to tell you to follow your gut or because you’re scared shitless, or if the difference is largely an illusion.

To chase a dream or security, we must divide ourselves between passion and practicality, and in the process, either take leave of our senses or be held hostage by them.

Sundays are the day when Christians herd together and everywhere dupe themselves into “believing” that by preaching about moral absolutism they are not only ever practicing moral relativism.

We are all victims of each other.

The paradox of love is that it is as much our primary source of strength as it is our primary source of weakness, and that we can only enjoy the one by learning to delight in the other.

Control freaks are people who spend all of their time and energy trying to change everyone else. And they do this, because they never seriously consider that trying to change everyone else is simply the result of their own refusal or inability to ever try and change themselves; let alone admit that they should.  But the truth is that people can only ever change others, by changing themselves. And all those who refuse or are incapable of doing the latter, which is the only road to heaven, nail themselves to a cross of their own pride and obstinacy, which is the door to hell.   Such people tend to derive a great deal of their identity and satisfaction from religions, since religions often reinforce the idea that it is other people who, because they are born flawed, must therefore "repent" (i.e., change) in order to please God.  The "believer," in contrast, is always quite certain that they, by virtue of professing to be a "Christian," have chang...

You see just how much religion is a sham when you see how people pretend to love God by pretending to love each other as His “family,” when so many of those same people have never even learned how to love their own families, let alone themselves. Or to put it another way, the history of Christianity is often a reflection of the history of many a Christian families. And many of the very Christians who think they are striving to save the world as much as their own souls with their "faith," simply deny that it is that very same "faith" that is contributing the most to destroying their own families. 

Trying to find the "truth" of that thing people call "God" is like trying to swim to the bottom of the ocean, at the same time you're trying to walk to the sun.

beautiful people are sometimes the ugliest people in the world, and the ugliest people in the world are sometimes the most beautiful

What if your entire life was all on television, like The Truman Show? Would you be ashamed or proud, or not bother to waste your time with feeling the need to be either one? Because how do you know that it ain't? We convince ourselves we would've figured it out by now if it were, but maybe that's just because we refuse to admit that maybe we're not as smart as we think we are. And whether it is or isn't, the point is to live as though it really doesn't matter either way. Because why should it, since you can't do anything about it anyway? 

Each of us has all we need to be great ... except the experience. And perhaps the desire.

People who depend upon religion for the meaning of life are like people who think you can find all the answers to life's most important questions by reading nothing but comic books. Religion, in other words, is God's version of comic relief.

Truth is what we hide from when we pray to God. And we pray to God to convince him he should save us from our own sins but condemn our enemies to hell for theirs.

Abraham Maslow once said that when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  So to, when you live in a society where the only tool you have for addressing people's problems is a "for profit" healthcare system, everything looks like a disease. In fact, before people found a way to make money off of addiction, addiction was always labeled a crime. And it's still a crime, if you're addicted to the wrong stuff, but it's a "disease" if you're addicted to the right stuff.  When countless children go to bed hungry every night in a country suffering from obesity, you know the former will eventually try to escape the unhappiness of poverty by getting hooked on drugs - either selling them or using them, or both - and will end up being labeled as a "criminal" (and thrown into a "for profit" prison somewhere), while the latter will become addicted to everything from opioids to fast food and be fed int...

God is a word designed by men to keep people in fear of the sky. 

Only humanity has demonstrated the willingness, intelligence, and fortitude, to turn itself into it's own greatest problem.

Our central nervous system needs constant stimulation with new stimuli, and so does our brain.  Otherwise, both our sensations and our minds begin to atrophy. But in our world, we have regimented our societies and our minds largely to run with all of the naturalness and diversity of a dish washing machine. And we did this with our religions even though repeating the same mistakes while expecting a different outcome is a form of insanity. We have turned our reality into ground hog day, in other words, and the only escape from it is the perennial newness of things to find on the internet. We built cyberspace to become our paradise, because we turned the world into our own hell. 

The heaven of wealth and the hell of poverty are entirely man made, but are defended by Christians as if both come directly from God, and are the necessary means by which God implements His justice and carries out His "divine will." In truth, however, the few can enjoy the spoils of the former only by nailing the many to the cross of the latter. Or to put it in Biblical terms, the many who are called must ultimately be crucified for the benefit of the few who are "chosen."      

People worship Jesus because he did what the vast majority of people - especially Christians! - would never even consider doing,  let alone have the courage to do. And that is, to die for your enemies, rather than to die trying to show your courage for a religion by trying to kill someone; someone you had only been duped by that religion to “believe” you should call your “enemy.” Humanity's true "enemy," in short, has always been his sacred religions. 

What serial killers like ted bundy tell us about ourselves is that humans find violence to be a form of sex. And what people like st Augustine tell us about ourselves is that sex is a form of violence. We see this even in the idea that our sins could only be forgiven through the sacrificial slaughter of an innocent man who was born of a virgin; as if to imply that the true sin of Adam & Eve was possibly purely sexual in nature.

Before being colonized and crucified by the imperial powers of Europe, Native Americans had never heard of suicide. But with the imposition of European ways, came European customs and habits. And one of those "habits" - for it occurred with enough regularity that it must have seemed like a habit to anyone wholly unfamiliar with the practice - was suicide. Indeed, even the Christian religion boasted of a God who had come to earth to save humanity in a sacrificial act of suicide unto himself. It was seeing the poverty and misery that trailed in the wake of those European conquerors that taught the Native Americans of just how sensible such a practice could be.  And this was because it was seen as simply a mercy killing of oneself, to save oneself from the agonies of slavery, which included but were not limited to, forced impoverishment.  For the agonies of such slavery were often as bad but far longer lasting than any other fatal form of cancer or disease. In fact, imp...

Suicide may be the only sensible solution to a world that runs on nothing but pure lies. For all those who “believe”in their sacred religions only worship and obey those lies as “infallible truth.” And by doing so, and always in the name of some moral authority they imagine they posses, they act like nothing but demons from hell to everyone else. Religion is the father of every lie; and people worship it like it's their God.

It is truly amazing to think about how much our religions, which all claim to come in the name of peace and love,  prefer war and violence to sex.

You can only reach heaven by finding peace from within, and you can only reach hell by allowing that peace to depend on anyone else.

Christianity and Capitalism are basically Ed Norton and Brad Pitt in Fight Club.

We used to play “pretend” all the time as children, when we imagined we were whoever or whatever we wanted to be, just for fun. Then we grew up, and realized we had to pretend all the time... ... just to survive. And we are going to keep doing it, even if it kills us.

Many of the most confident people in the world make most of the stupidest decisions in the world.

Hell is born of every attempt to cultivate and maintain an image of oneself in someone else's mind. And Heaven is refusing to cultivate or maintain such an image even in one's own. But for some people, it’s the other way around.  

We often fail to understand that many of the pictures people post on social media, the ones that make their life look like a permanent vacation in paradise, may be simply the veneer of someone living in hell.

If life was a cartoon, it would be funny as shit. The tragedy is that life isn’t a cartoon, but we treat it like it is, because we believe in a god who is simply a cartoon.

We fight with others often because we do not like ourselves.

Most people would rather face an enemy on a battlefield than themselves in the mirror. That’s why we create religions that embody all of the ideals we are taught we should aspire to achieve, even if we have to murder each other to achieve it. As a result, most people are really cowards of something, because only a damn fool wouldn’t be. It’s just about how we decide to face those fears. Because anyone who cannot face their greatest fears can never be honest with them self.

We can travel to the ends of the world and never escape our own hell.

In a society of lies, the truth is always treated like a second class citizen, and the greatest lies are all worshiped like gods.

Why do Christians who claim life is a gift from God always act like their own unwanted pregnancy is a curse from the devil?

The Christian thinks reason is a tool given to us by god to help us find god; and specifically the Christian God, and no other. Reason, as “believers” see it, is therefore like a black light that allows us to see certain things that can only be seen when that light is turned on. The belief that reason is something intended and designed to help us find god, however, is itself a pure act of faith. For there is nothing in reason that assures us that that is what reason is for, and plenty in reason that confirms how dangerous and often wrong we are whenever we start with such an assumption. God didn’t put all those things in broad daylight for all to see equally without the need for this light, however, so the Christian also believes,  because God loves us so much that he wanted us to save our soul from hell. And he wanted to us to save our souls from hell, by seeing if we could prove just how much we really love him, through our willingness to devote our lives to finding the rig...

The one thing that the very most people ever hear about someone they know, however tentatively they may know them, is that they died.  And it’s also the one thing that tends to endear us the most to that person,  because it means a part of our history, part of our story, part of who we were and are,  died along with them. For with every person that we know who dies, dies someone who knew us, and when none of the people who know us remain, neither will we.

To understand how Christianity became the religion of capitalism, one must understand the difference between Hunter- gatherer cultures and agricultural cultures. For it is precisely this difference that is the difference between freedom and bondage.

For artists and athletes, the pain of trying is almost the greatest pleasure of all, surpassed only by the pleasure of succeeding, for which most are willing to experience even more pain than pleasure to achieve.  

I wanted to go to an atheist meeting to see if atheists do the same things with their atheism that Christians do with their Christianity. I assume that they wouldn't, but if they did, I assume atheists would at least do it less often than Christians.  And I would think this, because that's exactly what I thought about Christians when I was a Christian. And I keep that in mind,  because I just don't want to end up getting checkmated by my own mind.  But telling this to the group may actually prejudice that group agaisnt me for having said it, which is so often exactly what most Christians do, and they do that, just as much as they deny that that is exactly what they are doing. I wish I could be more trustful of people's ability to reason their way out of the labyrinths of lies we create,  whose bowels form the environment which in turn creates all of us. We are made in the image and likeness, in other words, of all of those lies. And I am suspicio...

"God" is a meaningless word. Or if it is a word that means anything, it means "the image that a person holds in their mind - one that they they try to focus on as much as possible in the belief that doing so will provide wisdom, meaning, and at least a chance at eternal life - that is essentially an infinitely inflated, eternally perfect, all powerful image of themselves." Christians don't even believe that they can live up to this image, however, even after they die (which is apparently why they are so willing to fail so much at living up to that image even while they're still alive, even though many think they are living up to that image whenever the very people they are trying to "save" think they are only acting like the devil). To put it more simply: when a "believer" says they "believe in God," they are really saying they believe in a more perfect image of themselves, that they carry around inside of their head...

We live in a society that runs on ever greater profits, which is why companies spend billions of dollars every year figuring out ways to seduce us with the apple of their products through marketing, and trillions more on how to get us all to only want the things we don't already have. Christians might call this the devil, and think that if they spend simply an hour a week in a church somewhere beseeching God for forgiveness, it will either help to make things better, or at least assure they won't be cast into a lake of fire with all those who Christians also "believe" deserve to fry. It's also why they think "religion" can prevent a marriage from ending in divorce, even if it must rely on gas-lighting and emotional terrorism to accomplish it.

To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them?                                                                                  -- Hamlet The difference between the extreme Conservative and the extreme Liberal is that the former's philosophy can be boiled down to "think and don't do," while the latter's philosophy can be boiled down to "Do and don't think." They both have a point, of course, but it is unclear when which one is better called for, or if the long term consequences of either one will one day be more than the human species can survive. Hell, we don't even know if "opposing them" will actually "end them," or if "oppo...

The difference between who we think we are and who we really are is the difference between how highly we think of ourselves and how poorly we speak of others.

Imitation is a form of slavery, tradition is a form of tyranny, and habit is a form of bondage. And religion deifies this trinity into a God.  

To those in hell, suicide is an act of salvation.

While nature only ever evolves, religion only worships the past by crucifying humanity on the cross of its sacred traditions. And as one is as bold as the breath of life, the other clings out of fear to a dead letter.

People see us not as we are, but as they are.

Those who cannot change often hate those who do.

God is perfectly willing to allow human beings to unleash an endless torrent of unfathomable horrors upon both each other and every other species on the planet, according to Christianity, just as long as enough people in the world appease Him by not only opposing same sex marriage but also by herding themselves into churches once a week to grovel to his vanity. And if that isn't enough to convince atheists everywhere of the error (and arrogance) of their ways, then the fact that every single one of those churches - just like every single one of the religions those churches peddle like a serpent selling apples that will make each member of their flock "like God, knowing right from wrong" - are all equally certain that they alone have finally managed to discern the "true" meaning of God's ultimate message, certainly should be.  Religion, in other words, has been "the light of the world" by always demonstrating a preference for making war to makin...

Neuroscientists have concluded that the most remarkable thing about our brains is that there is no one thing that is remarkable about our brains. They have also concluded that there is no central principal or area of the brain that governs over all the other areas. Instead, each of the different sections of the brain work together like a congress of different cognitive perspectives, democratically deciding how to interpret stimuli from the outside world, and on what constitutes "truth." Additionally, they have found that the 100 billion neurons in our brain, and the 100 trillion synapses that connect nerve cells in our brains, actually atrophy in the absence of diversity and grow stronger with exposure to diversity. Creativity, as a result, can only grow in the rich soil of such diversity. Diversity, in other words, is the sunlight of creativity, while ever greater conformity tends to act like a burial shroud to such creative capacity, in the same way that keepin...

Have you ever wondered why horror movies and violent sports and video games have increasingly become our primary source of entertainment; why war and imprisonment are the primary engines of our economy; or why sociopaths and psychopaths not only seem to be running everything but also seem to derive much of their sexual gratifications from the suffering of others?  Perhaps it is because in a society that conditions us everywhere to become increasingly numb, pain becomes our greatest source of pleasure.

I stopped believing in religion when I discovered that  people who are different are always more interesting than people who are the same. And people who are the same tend to be angrier, more controlling, and more argumentative, than people who appreciate difference. And while man made religions impose cookie cutter conformity on everyone, nature only ever paints humanity with ever greater  diversity.

Human worship of a "perfect" God is simply a veiled denial of just how imperfect the human mind truly is.  "Believers," for example, have never been able to answer the question of how it is we can all be expected to discern a "perfect" God, along with what it means to aspire to a moral perfection based on such an infinite abstraction, if our brains are so finite and woefully flawed and imperfect.  Nor can they explain how discerning such "perfections" is in any way improved when such flawed people are all forced to make such determinations under the threat of hell and the bribe of heaven,  especially when nearly every study of human motivation and intelligence demonstrates how such incentives tend only to diminish such abilities, rather than improve them.   The quest to be as perfect as God, then, is simply the spiritual equivalent of striving to have a perfect IQ, even though scientists have no clear understanding of what we actuall...

 Most of us have never learned how to truly love ourselves, and not despite of our flaws, but because of them. The great lie, of course, is that we are broken. The truth, however, is that we are not, and we never have been.  We are simply human, and our only flaw is that we have been duped to believe we must be as perfect as a god by being as obedient as a dog and as binary as a computer. We chase after some idealized sense of religious or social perfection like a cat chasing its tail, failing to see how truly blessed we are to be exactly who we are, as we are.  For we are no less the serial killer than we are the saint. It is only in embracing our imperfections that we are made perfect, and only in our Sisyphean quest for perfection are we condemned to remain so woefully imperfect. Indeed, we are held together solely by our flaws, like a seamless garment, and torn asunder by our ideals. And as we are redeemed by the equality of the one,  we are every...

Christianity in a nut shell is the story of how humanity was forgiven for disobeying God by killing God, with a cross.   This is like believing a kid who disobeyed his parents by eating a cookie found forgiveness by murdering his parents, with a shotgun. And then that kid started a religion called the National Rifle Association, and taught people to think of the Melendez brothers in the same way Christians think of Moses and Abraham.

In religion, Hell is said to be a place run by demons who were cast down from Heaven for being singularly obsessed with the selfish and insatiable greed for the acquisition of everything, especially pleasure and power. In the Milky Way Galaxy, we call that same place planet Earth.   

"It is true that these mysteries are dreadful, and people have always drawn away from them. But where can we find anything sweet and glorious that would never wear this mask, the mask of the dreadful? Whoever does not, sometimes or other, give his full consent, his full and joyous consent to the dreadfulness of life, can never take possession of the unutterable abundance and power of our existence; can only walk on its edge, and one day, when the judgment is given, will have been neither alive nor dead."  - German Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke

To stare at a television is to be put to sleep by staring into the face of  our common insanity while staring at the night sky is to awaken to reality by gazing into the eyes of infinity.

Anger is both its own punishment and its own reward.

Hatred for an enemy is not love for oneself, but a projection onto another of what we hate most about ourselves, in the same way our love of a "god" is not love of an actual deity we imagine we perceive, even with our finite and flawed perceptions, but merely a projection of the perfect ideals we aspire to embody.

We must learn to love our enemies, because our worst enemy is usually ourselves.  

It is far better to aspire to fail than to succeed, for the former is not only a far easier goal to obtain, but because it is, it not only inspires others by the fearlessness with which we seek to obtain it, it also allows us to engage in and enjoy all of those experiences that the criticisms of our inner perfectionist bar us from even attempting to pursue.

Both the story of Christianity and the story of Adam & Eve are stories about the human quest to be as perfect as a "god," even though it is our quest to be perfect that is actually our greatest flaw, our "original sin," and the cause of all of our suffering. Or to put it more succinctly, our quest to be as good as God is what has always lead us to act as evil as the Devil.

We judge others for the things we hate about ourselves.

Perhaps one of the great problems of Christianity is not only how it fosters a denial of the true impermanence of life, but by convincing people  that such a denial - which only swaps a false “belief” of  immortality for the truth of our mortality - is the greatest virtue that should be practiced everyday, it actually foments ever greater anxiety about life than enjoyment of it. In fact, the potential threat of eternal hell leaves Christians to fret away their lives worrying if they will be among the lucky few who win the lottery ticket to enter heaven or the unlucky many who the Bible assures us are unavoidably destined to eternal tortures. Only by accepting the impermanence of life, however, can we begin to actually learn to enjoy life, for only by accepting that we are destined to forever lose our life can we be less anxious about how we choose to live it. Otherwise, our hope of a better afterlife predicated on how much suffering we offer up in Christ like fash...

Religion is proof that people can be made to love on command while claiming they are doing so happily and of their own free will. It is also proof that people are willing to love those who threaten them with endless torture. This should not be surprising, however, since it also convinces those same people that their coerced altruism has far less to do with simply their desire to save their soul from hell than it does with genuinely  loving their “enemies;” whom they often think deserve to end up in hell far more than they do. The only reason people "love their enemies" (which they never actually do, but they do a great job of "believing" they do, which makes them feel really good about telling others what to do and think) is not because they really care if those 'enemies' make it to heaven, but because they hope to avoid being thrown into hell for failing to obey such a commandment.

Those who cannot accept themselves stand in judgement of everyone else.

Alan Turing wrote a paper in 1960 called "Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” where he asked "Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?" Turing then goes on to describe a game that is really a test to determine if computers can actually think.  A movie about Alan Turing's efforts to break the German Enigma Code during World War II was released  in 2014 called 'The Imitation Game,' that was loosely based on Turing's ideas about whether computers can actually think.  Today, with the advancements in the development of Artificial Intelligence,  people ponder this question of whether computers can or one day will ever be able to "think." What most people have never thought to ask, however, is what exactly do we mean by the word "think," and have the vast majority of people ever actually engaged in so laborious a task in the first place.  As Carl Sagan once pointed out, science is n...

There is no cure for the crippling effects of curiosity or the leporsy of learning more than a given society wants to know.