The Rant Institute

 There is an irreducible difference between the world and our experience of it. We as human beings do not operate directly on the world. Each of us creates a representation of the world in which we live - that is, we create a map or model which we use to generate our behavior. That map, however similar it may be to that of others, is always unique to ourselves, the way our fingerprint or DNA is similar to others but also unique to ourselves. So too, our definitions and ideas of "God" are just as unique, however similar they may be to the definitions and ideas of others about the same word. Our representation of the world determines to a large degree what our experience of the world will be, how we will perceive the world, what choices we will see available to us as we live in the world.  Religion, however, not only claims that it is the only lens through which the "truth" map or model of the world or ideas of "God" can be known, despite it being wrong in i...

 those who kill and die and sacrifice their life for stories they hold to be sacred or divine or both, as a rule, often know little to nothing about the art of writing, and even less about the art and nature of storytelling. Indeed, the degree to which one is devoted to defending the former is always equal to how deficient they are in the latter. 

 Individuation does not only mean that man has become truly human as distinct from animal, but that he is to become partially divine as well. That means practically that he becomes an adult, responsible for his existence, knowing that he does not only depend on God but that God also depends on man. - Carl Jung, MDR, 408

 “Socrates said, “The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.” He wasn’t talking about grammar. To misuse language is to use it the way politicians and advertisers do, for profit, without taking responsibility for what the words mean. Language used as a means to get power or make money goes wrong: it lies. Language used as an end in itself, to sing a poem or tell a story, goes right, goes towards the truth. A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.” ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

 “Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.”— James Baldwin

 Conservatives are only "pro-life" to the degree to which they fear their own rights are threatened.   How do we know this?  Because if the only "legal" use for a gun was to perform an abortion, they'd all be pro-choice, and treat a womb like a classroom, and insist that life begins at birth, and use the Bible to support such a claim, and deny anything science says to the contrary. 

  There is nothing more animal-like than a clear conscience on the third planet of the Sun. Wislawa Szymborska of Poland won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996. This is the final line of her poem "In Praise of Self Deprecation."  Two kinds of people murder with a clear conscience: the serial killing psychopath and the true believer in a brand of God who is convinced they are doing God's will.  Most Christians deny their religion leads people to act like serial killers, even though that is what their entire religion is based on: Abraham setting out to kill his son, with a clear conscience he is doing so for God (so he can save himself from being tortured for all eternity in hell for daring to question the morality of God's command). 

Human Universals is a book by Donald Brown , an American professor of anthropology ( emeritus ) who worked at the University of California, Santa Barbara . It was published by McGraw Hill in 1991. Brown says human universals, "comprise those features of culture, society, language, behavior, and psyche for which there are no known exception." According to Brown, there are many universals common to all human societies. One of those universals is ambivalence. Ambivalence is having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone. And this applies to no one and nothing as much as God and the devil God of the Christian Bible, through a willingness to use violence and torture to punish and teach wayward sinners, therefore creates a universal problem for all of humanity, for which there is no possible solution.  What's the problem?  Well, every act of violence can always lend itself to interpretation, even by people who may be quite insane. Abraham's w...

A theodicy is a philosophical argument that attempts to explain why evil exists in a world created by a good God . The term comes from the Greek words theos (God) and dike (justice). Theodicy attempts to address the problem of evil, which arises when all power and goodness are attributed to God. Theodicy attempts to show how God's goodness and justice can be upheld in the face of evil, and to provide a framework that makes the existence of both God and evil plausible. Theodicy differs from a defense, which only shows that the coexistence of God and evil is logically possible. Some Christian thinkers reject any attempt to judge God's actions or fathom God's purposes by human standards. But this is like arguing that a dog has no right to judge the actions of its owner when that owner beats the dog or sets it on fire. The German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz coined the term "theodicy" in 1710. Leibniz's work, Essais de Théodicée sur la b...

 The belief that eternal pleasures await as a reward for having lived life as obediently as possible is an admission of not only how hard life is, but how much a person resents having to endure it.  Expecting heaven in the afterlife, in other words, is an act of ingratitude for this life.  And a belief in hell is to believe that those who did not perform such a test of life - a test they were never asked to participate in and from which there is no escape, not even death - with a passing grade by a grader who has demonstrated "his" willingness to punish the innocent and reward the guilty (Adman and Eve were thrown out of the garden of Eden, for example, which meant the serpent was rewarded for his lies with being the king of the jungle) deserve no less than eternal torments. For St Augustine, any infant or fetus who died before they were baptized had failed the test of life and damn well deserved their eternal sufferings as a result, for who can ever question God and his ...

 It is most laughable and terrible to discover that people have killed and died by the millions over differences in definitions of the word "God" - a paradoxical word that, more than any other word in the human language, is both the simplest to understand yet the most impossible to define - when even the United States Supreme Court has admitted it is incapable of defining what constitutes pornography, it just "knows it when it sees it."  Yet unlike pornography, God remains as impossible to see as the word "God" is impossible to define. Sure, you can look at the world or the stars and imagine what you are seeing is "God," but you can just as easily imagine it to just be stuff that people imagine to be "God." And even when we chose to imagine the former, it brings us no closer to understanding how to define such a word than we understand the universe we are peering into. Like pornography,  "God" stimulates countless numbers of p...

 Christians have a love affair with pain, violence, and suffering.That addiction is reflected in their most sacred of symbols - the crucifix. And through a kind of hypnosis of continually reading a "sacred" book where violence is God's vehicle for sanctifying the sinful into the eternally saved, Christians associate the pain and suffering that leads to death, with the sexual instinct that leads to life.  Christians believe in places like hell, an eternal torture chamber for all those who dare to reject their "beliefs" as either false or at least flawed, even though there are currently over 42,000 variations of the Christian brand of "faith." Many of these different brands believe that all of the other brands are false, and that those who have yet to realize their own faith-brand of Christianity is false or flawed deserve to be cast into eternal flames, where they will - and even should! - suffer for all eternity for their mistake.  And this is the whol...

 The object of Christianity is to erase what makes you a uniquely human individual in order to turn you into a walking cookie-cutout billboard for your religious brand. Christianity, in this sense, teaches you to think that everything about your human nature that cannot be reconciled to an absolute obedience to God (that is, as God issues his commands via an all too human and fallible institutional "church") is evil,  especially anything that makes you uniquely you.  Anything that in anyway hinders or distracts you from your ability, and indeed your moral obligation, to obey Christianity, is a potential threat that could be grounds for God casting you into eternal oven of hell in the afterlife. If you can obey Christianity more than others, you'll become a saint.  The Christian believes that their ability to choose being Christian over being merely human is a choice that they make, the reward for which is eternal paradise. And anyone who makes any other choice, even ...

 “Do you believe God exists?” Answering this question “Yes” or “No” is an example of attribution substitution.  But before we understand the problem with this question, we have to ask, what is "attribution substitution"? According to David Cycleback, in his piece "Brain Function and Religion," attribution substitution is an automatic unconscious process the brain uses to make speedy decisions needed to function. It contributes to many cognitive biases, misperceptions and visual illusions. It is a heuristic used when someone has to make a judgment about a complex, ambiguous situation and substitutes a different but more easily solved situation. (Poulter 2018), (Brockman 2007) The substitution is done at the automatic subconscious level and the person does not realize she is answering a related but different question. This explains why many visual illusions still trick the eyes after the person has learned they are visual illusions. This also helps explain why many in...

 if a soul entered a “life” at conception, as the Catholic Church now claims, then the Catholic teaching that unbaptized souls ended up in hell or limbo - which began with St Augustine - means that every spontaneous miscarriage throughout history, most of which may have been had by people who never even knew they were pregnant, all went straight from the God who creates them to the hell that same God created. And this, according to Catholic logic, must be blamed on the soul not on the God who came up with such a “divine plan.”

 When someone is listening to music, the music’s note, pitch, speed, volume and the listener’s ear vibration and heartbeat can be measured by scientific instruments. However, the listener’s aesthetic experience cannot. This experience is experienced by the listener alone. Even if asked to, the listener could not fully translate the experience to others, in part because it is beyond words and their own consciousness. The emotional experience is experiential, and therefore as subjective as it is ineffable.  And this illustrates the trouble with any idea of  a God, for God is an infinite abstraction that can only ever be experienced subjectively, like music, in a way unique to each and every person.  God, as such, operates like an emotional inkblot. So just imagine people arguing and killing each other over their interpretation of an inkblot, and that's what religions selling God encourage people to do. Or think of it this way. If God is infinity, then each person exper...

 Neil deGrasse Tyson: "If you live forever, then what's the hurry? Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow. There is perhaps no greater de-motivating force than the knowledge you will live forever.  If true, then knowledge of your mortality may also be a force unto itself-the urge to achieve, and the need to express love and affection now, not later.  Mathematically,  if death gives meaning to life, then to live forever is to live a life with no meaning at all."        So when Jesus promises eternal life, it has no meaning.

 “The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder’s lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately.” ― Bertrand Russell, Introduction to 1961 edition of Sceptical Essays (1961)

 a god who casts you into a fire for all eternity for failing to "believe" he is a "good god" is like a five year old child who refuses to talk to their parents for the rest of the child's life for the parent's failure to "believe" the child was actually a magical princess in a school play, not just playing a part in that school play. 

 One can be no more separated from a god that is the very substance of the universe than they can be separated from time and space, or an atom can separate itself from the universe on the whole. 

The miracle of Christianity is very simply demonstrated by the power it has to make a negative into a positive.  A person who claims to be a Christian often does so with pride. In fact, for many, being a Christian is the greatest thing about them, without which they feel they are nothing at all.  But to be a Christian, you must accept that there is something fundamentally and irreparably wrong with you that God could fix, but chooses instead to only treat, in order to keep you dependent upon a Church run by people who likewise are irreparably flawed, while convincing you that doing so is something you should not only be proud of, but should seek to convert others to doing.  This is like being proud of being a drug addict and wanting everyone else to claim to be a drug addict as well. Only the drug addiction can never be fixed, it can only be replaced with a purer drug - God! Welcome to my family. 

 “Faith” of the religious variety is like both the wizard of Oz and a curtain, behind which are three words that for some people are by far the scariest words ever spoken, and especially to have to admit and accept.  For others who have faced their fears of those words, naked and unafraid, and accepted unflinchingly whatever cost such words require as merely the price of all true liberation, they are the only path to true wisdom, awe, love, truth, and gratitude just to be alive. What are those three words?  “I don’t know.” 

Teaching children to believe they are born with the stain of original sin on their souls is a way of teaching a child  they are only worthy of being "saved" from the fire of hell through their willingness to confine their infinite curiosity and creativity within the dogmas offered by their brand of religion.  This is like telling a child to believe that the sin of having two legs can only be forgiven by walking in a straight line, and only in the direction their religion requires, for doing anything else with your own two feet is an offense to a God who doesn't have legs because he's completely immaterial. 

  Last time we looked at how filicide can be interpreted as both good and evil, just by changing the names from Jack and Danny Torrance to Abraham and Isaac. In contrast to religion, science sees Jack and Abraham to be as insane as David Berkowitz, the serial killer dubbed the Son of Sam after claiming his killing spree was in obedience to commands from his neighbor’s dog, Sam. And to transform Berkowitz from Jack into Abraham like water into wine, all we need is the right story, a will to "believe, "and another 4000 years. Thanks to a man with memory problems, we now know how turning a serial killing psychopath into a religious saint reflects the dualistic nature of memory. Since memorizing scriptures is one way to prove oneself worthy of salvation, religion would have colored that man more as a witch or pawn of the devil.  Yet, by enlightening us about how memory really works, he shed some light on how great sins can become holy sacraments of obedience with enough time. ...

 Christians and atheists have very different ideas of what it means to have, and more importantly to exercise, one's "free will" with regards to what and how a person is allowed by "God" to think.  The easiest way to understand this difference is to think about the nature of how freely a person can use their imagination and creativity as being the mental equivalent to how freely a person can use their own body. An atheist sees their mind as something with which they can dance, run, skip, walk, swim, jump, or anything else. In the same way they can use their body however they wish, so they can use their mind the same way.  The Christian sees their mind as being "intelligently designed" to do all those things, of course, but also believe that, to show the "creator" of such a mind and body they deserve to be saved from eternal tortures, they are required to "believe" in a particular version of their Christian religion, and if they don...

 The simple difference between science and religion.  Science requires you to change your understanding to fit reality. Religion requires you to change reality to fit your "beliefs," while insisting everything science discovers about reality that conflicts with your beliefs is a lie, because your "beliefs" are always infallible, because they come from God.  So what happens when the religious person encounters a scientist who dares to interpret what is often ambiguous information in a way that does not confirm or conform to the religious person's view of reality?  The religious person becomes convinced that the evidence is clear and unambiguous, and anyone who claims otherwise deserves to be tortured for all eternity, and anyone who agrees (even if they don't really believe it) deserves eternal pleasures for choosing to "believe" rather than question or be curious.  The end.

"If Jesus had been killed 20 years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little Electric Chairs around their necks instead of crosses" [Lenny Bruce]

 Christianity is a religion that requires you to glorify the gift of "free will" by only using your free will to act like being born is just like joining the military, that is, "God's army!" It is to glorify "free will" by deciding to only act like a robot.  This is like glorifying the gift of being able to move as freely as one wishes, to dance and run and jump and skip and so on, by only crawling, on one's hands and knees in supplication, in a straight line, straight to church and home again.  It's like being given play-doh as a gift, which you are free to shape into whatever you wish, and then being told by the person who gave you the play-doh that if you dare to mold it into anything other than in the image and likeness of the person who gave you the play-doh, that "gift-giver" will be so offended that they will feel perfectly justified in not only torturing you to death for doing so, but in keeping you alive as long as they can s...

Jesus was NOT the first man to "rise from the dead," as if rising from the dead were a more powerful or convincing show of divinity than simply freeing himself from a cross, or even doing to Pilate what Moses had done to the Pharaoh.  One of the arguments offered by Celsus, one of the pagan philosophers against Christianity was that it was pretending to be something it wasn't - something new. Celsus was a Conservative intellectual among Roman pagan philosophers. Like so many Conservatives today, his arguments for NOT accepting the new Jesus religion as valid are EXACTLY what Conservative Christians would argue for NOT accepting a NEW Jesus religion today. As for rising from the dead....   "They say that Zalmoxis, the slave of Pythagoras, also did this among the Scythians, and Pythagoras himself in Italy, and Rhampsinitus in Egypt. The last named played dice with Demeter in Hades and returned bearing a gift from her, a golden napkin. Moreover, they say that Orpheus di...

  The Catholic Church has long defended and practiced pederasty. In addition to the great St. Thomas Aquinas supporting pederasty, in 1531, Martin Luther upbraided Pope Leo X [1] for having vetoed a measure that cardinals should restrict the number of boys they kept for their pleasure, "otherwise it would have been spread throughout the world how openly and shamelessly the Pope and the cardinals in Rome practice sodomy." [2]     Nor was Leo the only one.    Guided by Aquinas’s divine perspective on the legitimacy of pederasty, Pope Benedict IX was famous for debauching young boys in the Lateran Palace, leading Saint Peter Damian to describe him as “a demon from hell in the disguise of a priest.” Pope Julius II (1503-13), who commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling, caught syphilis from Rome’s male prostitutes. Pope Boniface VIII (1294-1303), known as a pedophile who massacred the entire population of Palestrina, even famously declared ...