The Rant Institute

The older one gets, the more suicide looks like salvation.

Economics is a political religion

Face your fears or remain in hell.

Horror movies suggest that one of the pleasures of heaven may be watching people burn in hell.

The angriest people are always those who understand the least.

You can’t talk a person into seeing the world for what it really is, especially when they have a religious devotion to seeing it how it isn’t.

The problem with heaven and hell is that often times they seem like the same place.

Our original sin is allowing ourselves to believe we suffer from original sin.

The greatest demons in the world are those who demonize others.                                                 And they do so, always in self defense.

The people are the body of Christ, and the cross they have always been crucified on is power. That is our only original sin; one for which we would rather murder the whole world, than suffer the stripes of redeeming ourselves by coming down from it.

In the same way the universe is comprised of a disproportionately larger amount of antimatter to matter, so the human mind is comprised of a disproportionately larger amount of ignorance to intelligence; and that’s because intelligence knows that maintaining a self-awareness of its own ignorance is the most important strength, for it is the sine qua non of all learning, while ignorance is full of “passionate intensity” for its “convictions,” as Yeats put it, and sees any admission of ignorance as its greatest weakness, and simply proof of a lack of faith in God.

One man’s heaven is another man’s hell.

To believe in God is to believe you’re a god.

Love who you are, and you will learn to love who you were. Love who you were, and you will love who you will become. Do all three, and you become love.

We worship the god of wealth by sacrificing the poor on the altar of economics.

Anyone who brags all the time about how good they are, is clearly hiding something, in the same way that any religion that spends all of its time talking about "truth" is clearly lying.

Human consciousness is a form of collective insanity that dupes us into believing we are more like God than any other living thing. But if god is infinite, then saying humans are more like god than, say, aardvarks or amoebas, is like saying the number ten is more like infinity than the number two.

Most people fall in love with someone who's brokenness reflects their own,  because that brokenness feels like home.

You can only ever fall into an abyss by running from your fears, and rise like a phoenix from the ashes by facing them.

The best revenge against those who hate you is to love yourself.

If we are all made in the image and likeness of God, then the face of humanity as a whole, with all its diversity, is the face of God itself, with each of us representing but a single pixel in that image. Yet some of us actually believe that they are a better image of that God than others, by how they look, behave, or think; and more often than not, by all three together. And in the very same way no single atom, nor group of atoms in the universe - no matter how similar they may be in size, shape, and color, or even sexual orientation - knows anything more about the universe than any other,  so no single individual, nor group of individuals in a society, knows anything more about "God" than any other. Many theistic religions want us to think otherwise, of course, and simply because they decided to give their "God" a particular name, and devoted themselves to believing He thinks exactly like they do.  

An argument based on the fact that most people believe the same thing as you, is called a fallacy. A religion based on the same thing, is called faith.

Me sinning against an infinite god is like a gnat landing on a hurricane.

Everything is a form of indoctrination. We just disagree about which ones are good for us, and why.

I actually told my Mom, who was studying to be a nun and is as Catholic as can be, that I “could not find the truth by clinging to a belief, and simply because that “belief” tells me it’s hopeless to believe in anything else. And as I understand your “Jesus” story, that’s exactly what he did.” She’s wasn’t pleased, but she got it.

ideas were mankind's first toys. we just forgot it was all a game. And that’s why we kill each other over who’s is better.

Sometimes I really hate myself. And sometimes I couldn't be more impressed. I know all of us have some mixture of these two forces within us, but we tend to feel the one or the other almost always more than we really deserve to. Sometimes I'm really impressed with this idea. And sometimes I really hate it.  

Every attempt to change others is a refusal to change ourselves.

Religion hypnotizes us to worship a homogeneity of thought and fear the ambiguity of reality. It also teaches us to think of ourselves as hostages to a demon infested world, like prisoners of war who had betrayed their God, which is why we must have "faith" that we will one day be saved, and return "home" to heaven, to be with the very God who drafted us into this spiritual Vietnam War in the first place.  

To an infant, baptism is indistinguishable from water boarding. And circumcision is indistinguishable from castration. So much for do unto other as you would have them do unto you. (And don't try to tell me that any infant anywhere would ever volunteer for either one.)

The Moral Compass of Religion is this: I go to heaven for killing you for disobeying my God (i.e., disobeying me) while YOU go to hell for killing me for trying to kill you for disobeying me. In other words, nothing is ever a sin if you do it in the name of God, and everything is a sin if you do it for any other reason.

Understanding is the most fundamental requirement for all love, science, and art, while the most fundamental requirement for all religion, politics, and business, is misunderstanding. The former require truth while the latter depend almost entirely on lies. What's that tell you? 

I often wonder if, generally speaking, women are smarter than men, and for any number of reasons. But I don't actually think that "intelligence" can be measured, as if it were grains of sand that can be counted or quantified by weight. In the same way that not all calories are made or used the same way, with those from fat operating differently from those from protein or carbohydrates, so not all knowledge is the same either. In fact, most of what we tend to define as knowledge - like scientific racism, for example - is actually elaborately designed systems of profound ignorance. To believe we can actually measure intelligence, then, simply assumes both that all knowledge is equal, and that knowledge itself only accrues in one direction, like time. It also assumes that intelligence  only ever accrues in a way that we can accurately quantify and reduce to a mere number, using a system of measurement.  And we assume all of this, even though: 1) today we know that the...