The Rant Institute

Respecting Donald Trump simply because he America's president is like respecting a pig because it's wearing a dress.

The miracle of Religion is how it blinds "believers" from accepting responsibility for the suffering they alone are responsible for. They do this by passing off the responsibility for that suffering to their "God," while blaming the victims who are forced to suffer under the yoke of that delusion for bringing it upon themselves, through their own free will. Note the epitome of hypocrisy in doing this: for the victims suffer because they freely chose not to believe in a particular brand of "God," of which there are thousands, while the perpetrators who inflict that suffering have no other choice but to do so, according to them, because they are too terrified to consider they could ever be wrong; because they are too terrified to consider that life is only precious because it is finite, and ends at the coffin door.  However much "believers" wish and work to deny this simple infallible truth, religion produces far more suffering and damage in t...

The same people who support the murdering of people to protect property vote for people who designed the system that murders people for profit, from war and fancy prescription drugs to the war on drugs. Because we value profit and property more than people, the only ones who are allowed to destroy property are the ones who do so when they are killing people for destroying property.

The past is the present rolled out for understanding, and the present is the past rolled up for action. Will Durant Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death outside of her apartment building in the early hours of March 13, 1964, right across the street from where she lived in Kew Gardens, Queens, in New York City. A week later, a story came out that 37 people, who were in their apartments at the time directly across the street, witnessed the attack, but none of them wanted to get too involved by picking up a phone and calling the police. Since the attacker then fled and returned later to finish the job, the two attacks occurred over the span of 30 minutes, the second ending Kitty’s life. If anyone had picked up the phone , she would have survived. But they didn't. It would later turn out that the news story that reported this yarn to the public was in fact inaccurate, but it nevertheless became part of the lore of our society, one of fiction based on facts. That lore s...

A house divided cannot stand Abraham Lincoln If the story of Jesus Christ teaches us anything it's that people hate the truth. But m ake no mistake about it: in truth, America i s and has always been, a house divided, despite an overwhelming devotion to denying this is true. Just ask any Native American that ha s managed to survi ve our little " experiment in democracy."  And it was designed that way, on purpose.    E veryone through out history who has attempted to draw attention to this infallible truth, from Fredrick Douglas to Harriet Beecher Sto we to Martin Luther King to even Colin Kaepernick , has been attacked for failing to express it in a way that is acceptable to those who enjoy the lux ury of not having to worry about whether it is true or not.  A nd rather than address the reality of such truth, the conversation is always reframed and refocus ed on statistics, which Mark Tw ain aptly de scribed as "damned lies. Such reframi...

If a “belief” has ever been used to cause any form of suffering - be it physical, psychological, or emotional - It becomes immoral to continue to believe it is true. And if the only evidence being offered is the written testimony of countess numbers of people, which is by far the least reliable evidence there is, which has been rewritten countess numbers of times over thousands of years, and always by people who engage in genocide because they heard voices telling them to do so, from the Amalekites  to the American Indians, it is not only immoral, it is the blasphemy of truth itself.

What people lack in intellectual capacity to understand they make up for in emotional hostility. And what people lack in emotional empathy they make up for in intellectual hostility ... masquerading as a conviction, or a sacred tradition, or love for one brand of ideas or another, as if we are all computers that must operate according to a single divinely written operating system, and stopped from being allowed to program our own operating system however we like.

If you learn how to use it, your mind is the greatest toy there is.

Christians think they deserve to win heaven for living in fear of God their entire life. That’s why heaven has to exist; To make up for everything they had to give up while on earth, which made life such hell.  You know, things like bacon, and beef bar-b-ques on Fridays for a month every year.

To be a Christian who distrusts the government of a "Christian nation," a government run by politicians who all proclaim to be Christian, is an admission that Christianity not only fails to make people moral, but that anyone who claims to be a Christian should not be trusted.

The desire for eternal life is a form of greed that kills the human capacity to evolve for the benefit of those of our species who will come after us. The worship of a god that sanctifies human sacrifice is a love of death in sheep’s clothing. And to believe that eternal suffering is a form of moral justice is to believe that immeasurable evil should be glorified as an eternal virtue.

Life is how the finite experiences the infinite.

Theists think that everything in the universe is evidence for their God but that all of the horrible things that happen in that universe should not be held against that God but blamed on people. God, in other words, is the serial killer from Saw, and the universe is his torture chamber for teaching people to love him, just in case commanding them to do so and threatening them with eternal hell wasn't enough. 

The word "psyche" is a Greek word that Plato used which means "soul" or "spirit." From this viewpoint, psychology means "knowledge or understanding of the human soul or spirit." European philosophers and theologians had speculated for millennia on the existence and properties of the "soul." But in 1672, Thomas Willis asserted that the "soul" is a function of the human brain rather than the heart or some immaterial entity. The human mind is therefore, the human soul.

the standard for how others treat us is set by how we lean to treat ourselves

The only way to find your other half is to learn to love the half you've got. That's the only way to recognize the best parts of yourself in your other half. If you focus on all of the bad parts about yourself, than the "other half" you find will be a reflection of everything that's wrong with you, rather than what's right with you.

Racism is not born out of a lack of empathy, it is born out of a love for one's class and the privileges that class tends to provide. The less privileges your class provides you, the less conservative you will be in your desire to maintain a system based on classes of people, race and wealth and what have you, while the more privileges your class provides you, the more conservative you will be to defend a "right"  - and often they are thought to be "God given rights" - to enjoy those privileges.    Those who advocate for the status quo, those who wish to maintain the most stability to the system that provides them with the privileges they enjoy, see themselves as being the more "responsible set of men" who contributed to building the system into the monolith that it is. And because they feel responsible for, in some small way, contributing to the virtues of the systems more than to its vices, they feel they have earned the right to enjoy the privi...

The story of Adam and Eve is a story of newlyweds who argued about right and wrong while they let the garden they lived in go to waste. And today, waste is an economic virtue, and he who wastes the most is treated like a saint.

Often temptation is nothing more than your future self telling you to stop wasting time, and do something you want, while you still have the chance. Because you never realize how fast it all goes by, until you discover you're riding in the caboose of your life.  

The schizophrenia of the world today can be seen in the fact that, to justify unchecked wealth, we are to believe that we live in a world of plenty, even though we all know that most of the people in the world are homeless and starving.

If people are going crazy, it’s because the world runs on systems that have all of the sanity of a machine.

I am with you, you men and women of a generation, and know how it is.  Walt Whitman If everyone in the world today seems to be running around screaming like chicken little that the sky is falling, do not forget a simple lesson to be taken from it all: more than ever before in history, this is your day. Do not fear it or turn away. Rather, embrace it, for it is here to teach you some hard lessons about life, but they are the most important lessons there are, if ever you hope to understand the truth of the world you are destined to inherit, lessons that most people spend their lifetime trying to gloss over, escape, hide from, and deny.  The world has not suddenly become a wasteland devoid of hope and possibility, even though the nightly news so often seems to only trumpet such a narrative from the rooftops. Despite what may often feel like an overwhelming fixation on how the world is coming to an abrupt and ugly end tomorrow night, six o'clock sharp, the times you li...