The Rant Institute

We can only change our future by facing our past.

The first great form of violence is war, and the second is ecomincs . One is like putting a bullet through the brain and the other turns  life into a hopeless drug addict.

I believe in free thinking, even if it may be more likely to lead humanity to its own destruction than our ideologies and religions - a proposition that defies both belief and history - because everything else is a form of bondage based on a lie.

there's nothing like an old familiar song taking you to a whole new place.

I was in a discussion over the weekend with some people about whether Artificial Intelligence would usher in the renaissance or ruin of human evolution. But AI - if it were truly an "intelligence" and not a robotic machine - would not only be simply the echo chamber of our collective ignorance and fear, paradoxes and contradictions, but one amplified beyond our ability to ever understand - especially when we are clearly so incapable of having any serious  understanding of our own, and general consensus has historically always demonstrated a strong preference for believing easy lies to a hard truths. And more importantly, it would also have to have free will. And how can you create that, when our own intelligence is so incapable of determining once and for all whether we have one or the other, or the degrees to which we operate with both.       

Only a human being who thinks of himself as a "god" would want their name and their story praised by all other human beings for the rest of history, whether that person is Julius Caesar, Jesus Christ, or Adolf Hitler. A god caring about whether people worship him or call him by the right name is like a person obsessing about whether ants in his backyard do the same thing, and threatening to open up the hose on them if they don't.

The theist is incapable of distinguishing the difference between their love for a deity and their fear of that same deity, or between whether their beliefs are motivated more by their hope for heaven or fear of hell, but they are quite confident that having both makes them wiser and more moral than the atheist who eschews the need for either one.

Be who you are, and accept people for who they are, and don't expect that someone will change. Or that, if they do, that it is more likely to be into something different from what you hoped for or even expected. And expect that if they do, and they think they did it for you, they'll eventually come to resent you for it. Even if you had nothing to do with it.

We are what we look at, just as much as what we are always looking at is ourselves.

It is incredible to see how much we seek approval the most from those we tend to respect the least, and with equally good reasons for knowingly doing both. To have faith in an idea you have of God, is to believe that "God" believes all of the same things that you do. Maybe that's why people who have "faith in God" tend to see all those who disagree with their "beliefs" as thinking like the devil. Religion teaches you it is both a virtue and a moral necessity to believe that "true freedom" comes only by loving and being overly concerned with what a deity thinks of you; a deity, mind you, who has locked all of life in a mental asylum where all the different races of inmates - what humans call "species of life" - are forced to survive by either eating or exploiting each other.   Reading a book is to enjoy the thought of danger without serious risk,  but writing a book means risking everything as if there were no danger at all. ...

God can be a fact without being necessarily true, in the very same way that just because a dream is a fact does not make it "true."

Religion is to finding truth what rape is to finding love. 

Hell is conforming to the dictates of someone else's dogmatic beliefs. Religion defines this as the only way to find freedom on the road to heaven.

What we sacrifice in the beginning we only regret in the end. And the distance between these two points is how long it takes for us to learn this.

I do not care if theists cling to their "beliefs" about "God," the same way Linus clings to his blanket or Calvin to his stuffed tiger Hobbes. But I do care when theists start using that blanket to hang people who refuse to believe that Hobbes is not simply a stuffed tiger that they cling to with childlike affection, but is as alive as we are, and must be obeyed by all - Or else...

Christianity claims to speak for God and that the Bible is his only word, even though books are written by power hungry, fallen, fallible, men, while insisting that whatever testimony God may give for himself through all of nature itself - from genes to galaxies - is inadmissible as hearsay.

 Theists “believe” they understand “God” better than atheists. But they can’t understand why atheists refuse to “believe” the same thing.

marriage is often a relationship where one person promises to love the one who will torment them the most, and another person promises to faithfully do so, so long as they both shall live.

The opposite of empathy is pyscopathy. And religion, by threatening eternal torture to all those  who empathize with other human beings (inspite of their differences) more than they love a pysopathic “god” - who not only murders humanity with plagues, famine, and a “great flood,” but also threatens each of us with eternal torments for daring to love human diversity more than an immaterial god who acts like a spoiled rotten adolescent when he doesn’t get enough attention and worship - only works to turn the water of the former into the wine of the latter.

Christianity teaches people to believe that the best in life comes only after you die.

The more we focus our attention on the extremists who oppose our ideas the more extreme we become for our ideas.

truth is the only word that sounds like music, which is why love feels like a song written just for us.