The Rant Institute

Here is a simple example of the difference between theism and atheism. One looks at the world through the lens of a 4000 year old "belief," and the other through the modern lens of scientific understanding. To understand the difference between how the two lens shape and color what we see as "true," we have to understand the difference between Viagra and the fertility god Priapus, protector of fruit plants and male genitalia. The former does through science what the latter does through miracles.  As any veteran of the battles with terrorism knows, one way to win those battles is by first winning allies to the cause. To do that, US intelligence officers in Afghanistan frequently visited rural territories to gain the assistance of tribal chiefs against the Taliban.  These interactions are challenging because the leaders are often unwilling to help, owing to a dislike of Westerners, a fear of Taliban retribution, or both.  On one such visit, a Central Intelligence Agenc...

 "Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan, the Fascisti. and Mr. Winston Churchill? Really I am not much impressed with the people who say: "Look at me: I am such a splendid product that there must have been design in the universe." I am not very impressed by the splendor of those people. Therefore I think that this argument of design is really a very poor argument indeed.  Moreover, if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is merely a flash in the pan; it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions of temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort o...

I've always wondered why God doesn't perform miracles all  the time. When Jesus comes and heals a sick or blind person, for example, it begs the question of why he doesn't heal everyone of everything? After all, if God could choose to murder everyone and everything on the planet with a flood, why couldn't he have just chosen to heal everyone of everything instead, including of any and all sins just as easily?  Flooding the planet because of sinners suffering from a "stain" they were born with that predisposes them to an addiction to sin is like a doctor blowing up the hospital he works in because it's full of patients born with health problems because their parents were drug addicts.  On the other hand, God performing a single miracle here or there is like that same doctor who blew up the hospital having the ability to heal and cure everyone in the hospital, but healing only one or two patients instead, and all out of his own addiction to needing to try to...

 The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action." [Albert Einstein] On the one hand, the lack of evidence to support the myth of Christianity requires an inordinate amount of energy and time constructing elaborate arguments, most or all of which are built on one fallacy of argument or another.  That time and energy would be better served in finding solutions to all of life's problems - especially the problem of a religion that claims we are designed to be dependent upon a church - rather than arguing about an infinite abstraction. Arguing about an infinite immaterial God is like arguing who has counted nearest to infinity.  On the other hand, those who claim they truly know more about what the word "God" means than you do, and use this claim to support why they and their ideas must be accepted as the basi...

"If we are going to teach 'creation science' as an alternative to evolution, then we should also teach the stork theory as an alternative to biological reproduction." Judith Hayes, In God We Trust: But Which One? (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1997), p.

 "Throughout the last 400 years, during which the growth of science had gradually shown men how to acquire knowledge of the ways of nature and mastery over natural forces, the clergy have fought a losing battle against science, in astronomy and geology, in anatomy and physiology, in biology and psychology and sociology. Ousted from one position, they have taken up another. After being worsted in astronomy, they did their best to prevent the rise of geology; they fought against Darwin in biology, and at the present time they fight against scientific theories of psychology and education. At each stage, they try to make the public forget their earlier obscurantism, in order that their present obscurantism may not be recognized for what it is." Bertrand Russell, "An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish" (1943) in Bertrand Russell on God and Religion (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 209.

 Not for all, but like many Christians, my true authenticity was dead and buried  inside me. It was the source of longing and emptiness within myself that was like a child locked in a  closet. I did not "know thyself," as the ancient Greek philosophers said was both the hardest thing to do and yet the most important. Taught to believe I was a "born sinner" crippled my ability to fulfill my true design,  convinced as I was that I could only be saved by someone other than myself. And not just anyone could save me, so broken and bad was I born, but only a God! Accepting such a belief created a deep dependence in me on my Catholic Church, while my true self was locked like a lighting bug trapped in a jar of self doubt. And as I grew up, that lightning bug became the traumatized and neglected boy buried in the tomb of a man who's identity, who's worth, who's whole meaning, was based on Catholicism, without which I was all flesh and no bones. My Catholicism ha...

The doctrine of "the stain of original sin" is a doctrine taught by the Catholic Church. It is a doctrine that claims every human is born with the stain of "original sin" on their soul, thanks to the disobedience of Adam and Eve.  First, God wiped out humanity with a flood for the effects of this sin. Then He had the bright idea of being born human, but withholding from himself the stain of such a sin. Then he killed his human avatar, since God himself, who is said to be able to do anything, is nevertheless incapable of actual death. So, he incarnated into a physical form so He could kill himself, and experience the process, meaningless as it is to Him. Life, from this perspective, is an offense to God. The doctrine of original sin clearly demonstrates this, for it means that every "gift of life" God gives is a gift God Himself is offended by.   Nor does anyone who receives such a "gift" have the right, or the choice, to refuse it.  Yet the gift ...

  How ironic it is that while every other truth in the universe is true independent of whether we believe it or not, God choose to cure souls deformed through an act of deception by requiring them to “believe” something that can only be empowered through our willingness to “believe” it. Miraculously enough, this just happens to be the only way in which every lie in the universe is given any power at all – starting with the one that caused all of humanity to be born with the indelible stain of original sin to begin with, and all because Adam & Eve failed to exercise the necessary amount of doubt to save themselves from being sold a lie that they could "become like God." And by "become like God," they thought they would live forever and ever and ever. - the very same thing the Catholic Church promises everyone who obeys the Catholic Church. But why? Of the infinite ways of forgiving us for being born with s sin stained soul due to being deceived, which is to forgi...

 "If such a God did exist, he could not be a beneficient God, such as the Christians posit. What effrontery is it that talks about the mercy and goodness of a nature in which all animals devour animals, in which every mouth is a slaughter-house and every stomach a tomb!"  E.M. McDonald, "Design Argument Fallacies" An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism (ed. Gordon Stein, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1980), p. 90.

 "I combat those only who, knowing nothing of the future, prophesy an eternity of pain- those who sow the seeds of fear in the hearts of men- those only who poison all the springs of life, and seat a skeleton at every feast." [Robert G. Ingersoll]

 "Marge, have you ever actually sat down and read this thing? Technically, we're not even allowed to go to the bathroom."  Priest on "The Simpson's"

 "Should a conflict arise between the witness of the Holy Spirit to the fundamental truth of the Christian faith and beliefs based on argument and evidence, then it is the former which must take precedence over the latter, not vice versa." William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics , (Revised edition, Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994), p. 36. And, we should add, when a conflict arises between witnesses of different  brands of fundamental truths of the Christian brand of "faith," since God never intervenes in a person's free will to err in understanding or misusing his brand of "faith" - as evidenced by Jim Jones and countless other Christian cult leaders - the "truth" shall need to be sorted out through trial by combat. 

 "It could be argued that the greatest confidence trick in the history of philosophy is the attempt to make the various arguments for the existence of God support each other by using the same term for the entity whose existence each is supposed to establish. In fact, almost all of them bear on entities of apparently quite different kinds, ranging from a Creator to a moral Lawgiver. The proofs must, therefore, be supplemented with a further proof or set of proofs that shows these apparently different entities to be the same if the combination trick is to work. Otherwise the arguments must be taken separately, in which case they either establish or fail to establish the existence of a number of remarkable but unrelated entities." Michael Scriven, "God and Reason" Critiques of God (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1997) p. 112.

 "The night of December 25, to which date the Nativity of Christ was ultimately assigned, was exactly that of the birth of the Persian savior Mithra, who, as an incarnation of eternal light, was born the night of the winter solstice (then dated December 25) at midnight, the instant of the turn of the year from increasing darkness to light." [Joseph Campbell, _The Mythic Image_, Bollingen Series C, Princeton University Press, 1981, p. 33]

 To have faith is to trust yourself to the water, as Alan Watts said. Having faith is not to trust that a lifeguard is always watching over you, in any body of water from a bathtub to a swimming pool to an ocean, but to trust that we can float, and even swim. Baptism wants us to be afraid that we will drown without God because our sinful souls are like a led ball that prevents us from swimming, and drags us down, down, down, to hell.  Faith, however, can only come from believing we were born to swim. For Christians, faith is always needing a God to watch over them like an all-watchful government agency, even though such a God almost never actually jumps in to save a drowning person, whether they are a child drowning in a backyard pool or a child being molested by a pedophile, even one that may happen to work for God himself! As Watts goes on to explain, when you swim, you do not try desperately to grasp hold of the water, panicking as the water escapes your grasp, because doin...

 A martyr is someone who would rather die than think for themself. By "martyr," we mean those who would die believing their "belief" is infallibly true, and that dying to prove one's conviction to such an idea, in the hope that doing so will win them the ability to avoid hell and maybe even purgatory, and spend eternity in heaven with the God who required them to prove they were worthy of groveling to his divine majesty for all eternity, is a perfectly rational thing to do.   A clever man, however, understands that "believers" are so insecure of their cherished "beliefs" that they would rather crucify anyone who dares to propose a different way of thinking than dare to think differently than they always have.  Someone who dies for the freedom to think as they wish are always called heretics by the people who kill them. And the same people who love killing heretics are the same people who love worshiping martyrs.  How ironic.  

 "Are we to infer from this that the world was made by a Creator? Certainly not, if we are to adhere to the cannons of valid scientific inference. There is no reason whatever why the universe should not have begun spontaneously, except that it seems odd that it should do so; but there is no law of nature to the effect that things which seem odd to us must not happen. To infer a Creator is to infer a cause, and causal inferences are only admissable in science when they proceed from observed causal laws. Creation out of nothing is an occurrence which has not been observed. There is, therefore, no better reason to suppose that the world was caused by a Creator than to suppose that it was uncaused; either equally contradicts the causal laws that we can observe." Bertrand Russell, "Science and Religion" (1931) in Bertrand Russell on God and Religion (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 177-78.

 "The efforts of the majority to destroy every trace of heretical 'blasphemy' proved so successful that, until the discoveries at Nag Hammadi, nearly all our information concerning alternative forms of early Christianity came from the massive orthodox attacks upon them." Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels , (New York: Vintage, 1989), pp. xxiv.

"It is important to recognize that, in maintaining that irreducibly random processes exist, contemporary physics does not propose that those processes are lawless or unordered. Instead, it is claimed that the fundamental laws of physics are probabilistic. A probabilistic law is a statement asserting that, in a particular type of situation, a particular type of outcome will occur with a particular probability."  Philip Kitcher, Abusing Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982), p. 87. Now, lets apply this law of probabilities to the claims that a child ended up pregnant 2000 years ago and who was likely to blame for it. Mary was only 13 when she ended up pregnant with Jesus. And there’s only three ways that could’ve happened.  The first is that she had consensual sex with someone and wound up pregnant.  The second is that her pregnancy was the result of rape.  And the third is that God did it.  Given the capital punishment that could result as a consequence of ...

 To hope for an eternal life in paradise after we die is a form of ingratitude for the life we are living … In the same way that hoping for an infinitely more perfect partner after we die is an act of ingratitude for the partner we may be married to in this life. 

You have to be in a kind of hell already to feel any need to tell others they are going to hell, especially in the hope that by doing so you'll avoid such a hell and be rewarded with heaven. Put another way, to feel the need to tell people they are going to hell, indeed if you feel the need to believe in hell itself as a real place, is to admit to being so haunted by anxieties about both the uncertainties and the unfairness of life that the only way to make life bearable is by believing you will not only be rewarded with eternal paradise for having suffered through it to the bitter end,  but that all those who contributed to such anxieties by failing to believe  the same things that you do should be tortured - and not for just a weekend like Jesus, but for all eternity!