The Rant Institute

The trouble with pro-life people who oppose abortion is that they fail to understand that for most people today, thanks in a major way to their Republican Party, to be born into this world is no different than being condemned to hell.

By far the greatest story there is is one that has never been told. That story is the story of how and why we came to worship a single story as “the greatest story ever told.” To tell that story is to map the genome of God, and how it  metastasized in our minds and shaped everything from the wheel to the World Wide Web, from money to messiahs, and from ideas about gravity to our understanding about space and time. That is the story I wish to tell.

The altar of Catholicism is the bed of Procrustes.

Religion is to human reason what magic is to hard science.     

All of our sacred belief systems deserve to be challenged, because, as D.S. Clarke pointed out in his book Panpsychism and the Religious Attitude , "to sit back and refuse to accept the challenge is, in effect, to contribute to the continuance of their reign." Indeed, only by forever challenging every "truth" we find, can we ever hope to find any truth at all. Lies are the eternal enemy of truth. And agaisnt the enemy, as written in the Law of the Twelve Tables, revendication is eternal.

Conservatism in theory is simply a religion based on libertarianism, but in practice it publicly subsidizes agriculture, technology, energy, financial, defense, science, medical research, the prison industries, and even religion, while condemning any suggestion of public subsidization of health or education as Communism or Socialism. Conservatives also fail to understand that there are only two classes of people politicians ever talk about: real people and fictional people. Fictional people are corporations, otherwise called legal fictions. And whenever Conservative Republicans talk about liberty, this only ever produces greater freedom for the latter, to increasingly enslave the former, in the bondage of  debt.

Money men know that all they have to do is give a liberal enough money and they'll eventually turn into a conservative. This process also works at the same time in the reverse as well, of course.  And a stable economy depends as much on the asymmetry the two must always retain in relation to each other, as always having the right proportion of both. But those proportions are not static, thanks to our technology, and are simply the result of the particular brands and versions of the "beliefs" we happen to have about the nature of money, property, and power. But those beliefs obviously need to be changed, which is the last thing anyone with money, property, or power, would want.    It is not that these ideas are necessarily anathema to forming any truly moral society, although we often fail to see or understand the many valid arguments offered for why they may very well be, from people like P. J. Proudhon in "What is Property? " It is that the ideas w...

We are often the most irrational, Mumford Lewis pointed out, when we are being the most objective and scientific. Christianity, for example, which proclaims that everyone has free will, thinks such "free will" must be operated with all the mechanical obedience of a computer in order to avoid eternal damnation. And why, you might ask? Because our "original sin" is that our endless quest for perfection only serves to addict us to any religion or "belief" that promises to turn all our our fears and suffering into love and salvation. It is not surprising, therefore, that the most devout political and economic Conservative almost always believes in God and Christianity, for both belief systems foster dreams of rewards for their patriots, martyrs, and saints, in this life or the next. The patriot does this by proclaiming their faith in the greatness of their nation, or more importantly for the economic religion that nation claims to practice, even unto...

The Catholic Church is no different than the Mafia, when you think about it, for both run protection rackets, one from God and the other from John Gotti.

truth is an insect we love to burn beneath a magnifying glass

The difference between Penn State University and the Catholic Church is that, when the former discovered their favorite son - "Joe Pa" -  had done nothing about the rampant pedophilia that was going on right under his nose, they fired him, and sent those who sought to protect the institution at the expense of the abused children to jail, while the latter canonized the "papa" who did both on a global scale ("pope" is Latin for "papa), John Paul II, as a saint.

People addicted to lies are incapable of recognizing the truth.

The scandal of child abuse in the Catholic Church should be surprising to no one, for the lure of power is irresistible to those seduced by the hypnotic power of hypocrisy, and always evinced by those who celebrate the sacrament of conflating their “beliefs” with  something as mercurial and polymorphous as the truth, the most.

It’s one thing to care about criticism. It’s another thing to care even more about compliments. The face of truth is always shamed in a world of lies, where only the greatest liars are hailed as heroes, and always for the eloquence with which they spit upon the face of honesty like a whore, and seduce us into worshipping their myths and their gods - which are almost always the same thing - as the only “truth” there is.

Sometimes I get the craziest buzz off of reality. And dissolve into music.

We are taught to belive that religions, which necessarily conflate their beliefs with truth, are necessary for morality, to hide the fact that any system the conflates truth with beliefs can only ever be immoral.

 Christianity  teaches people to believe that the only path to spiritual enlightenment is through voluntary enslavement to Christianity.

The difference between a fool and a wise-man is not how much either may know about a particular subject, but that the former thinks everyone who fails to see things their way is a fool, while the latter can find great wisdom even in the mind of the greatest fool. And a good person who tries to expose how such wisdom is used to make fools of everyone, is usually always crucified by such fools as a heretic, while a bad person is only ever someone who resurrects that heretic's name, like a grave robber or a witch doctor, and uses it to obtain riches, power, and fame for themselves, at everyone else's expense.  And always by convincing them that they need to, or there will be anarchy in the streets, and hell to pay.

Those who know the least obey the best. Disobedience, in other words, is often the inevitable byproduct of knowledge, and the surest evidence of both freedom and independent mind. Religion is the worship of a system that teaches the very opposite to be the only infallible "truth" there is.

The Catholic Church’s position on gay marriage is proof that God's love for humanity is only gender deep.

a nightmare is how our subconscious reminds us things could be worse.