The Rant Institute

 Faith in religion is not a faith in God, it is in fact the very opposite of a faith in anything worthy of being called "God." Instead, faith in one's religion is to believe a person has a moral obligation to "have faith" that religion will one day find something - anything - that science will not contradict or prove is false.  It is also to believe that waiting for this - despite how science continually proves every single idea religion has to offer as either untrue or wholly improved when separated from religion  (for clearly people can be more moral without fearing they will be cast into a furnace for failing to burn witches and homosexuals at the stake) - is a moral obligation to "the truth." And by "the truth," we mean the greatest bunch of lies ever sold by serpents for their own gain.

 Question are more sacred than the answers, for just one of the former can give birth to the infinite number of the latter. Religion turns this around, and with a single answer crucifies every question that creativity and curiosity can dream up to free us from the barnyard of sacred beliefs.   

 IF Christianity is true, then the entire universe was created for the sole purpose of God wanting to train humans not to piss him off through commands and threats of punishment and promises of rewards.  If Christianity is true, in other words, God is a dog trainer and humans are his prize dogs, and either he will let us sit on his lap if we learn to behave and not piss on his royal carpets, or roast us over a camp fire for all eternity like a hot dog.  And men have spent their whole life defending this idea as if it not only makes perfect sense, but they happen to agree it is a perfectly moral arrangement, and the God who designed it deserves nothing less than undiluted love and adoration for having done so. 

  To educate an individual to be guided and controlled by emotion or passion in religious matters, and expect him to exercise reason and judgment in reference to other phases of his life’s conduct, would mean to teach him to act directly contrary to his religious teaching.   Religious teachings boil down to "love," which enables a person to use their reason to justify literally anything, especially anything that will appease a "God" that is seen as perfectly moral in His willingness to torture you for all eternity for refusing to "obey" a church founded on the suffering of the most innocent man in history, while God left the devil not only unscathed, but with more power than ever! Religious teachings, as such, boil down to requiring as much "love" of the God as a person has "fear" of the devil. And with that, and only with that, is every form of evil violence practiced in the name of religion not only permitted, but celebrated as sacre...

 Frank Sinatra on his religious views which he compares to Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein. Highlights include:  “I believe in you and me. I’m like Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein in that I have a respect for life — in any form. I believe in nature, in the birds, the sea, the sky, in everything I can see or that there is real evidence for. If these things are what you mean by God, then I believe in God. But I don’t believe in a personal God to whom I look for comfort or for a natural on the next roll of the dice I’m not unmindful of man’s seeming need for faith; I’m for anything that gets you through the night, be it prayer, tranquilizers or a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. But to me religion is a deeply personal thing in which man and God go it alone together, without the witch doctor in the middle.  The witch doctor tries to convince us that we have to ask God for help, to spell out to him what we need, even to bribe him with prayer or cash on the line. Well, I beli...

 Christianity asserts that humans are the highest form of intelligent life created by God, that we alone are created in the image and likeness of such a divine "intelligence," and all other species are lesser forms of intelligence than our own.  As a religion, however, Christianity uses commands to tell us what and how to love and to live, and why, and for our obedience or disobedience to its commands - which it assures us come unfiltered directly from "God" - it promises heavenly reward or threatens eternal punishment. As a result, Christianity wants us to believe that the highest form of intelligence God created on earth must be treated and trained as no better than that of a dog being trained not to piss inside on the rug, while denying that God had any moral obligation to come up with a better “plan” to save us all from the Auschwitz he keeps fully operational in the afterlife called hell (in which he intends to keep our pain receptors equally healthy and fully ...

God - who is said to be able to do anything - is apparently incapable of demonstrating "he" is good without the need to contrast it with evil. Often, that contrast involved God engaging in acts of evil to defeat evil, such as when God treats Sodom and Gomorrah like Hiroshima and Nagasaki or redirects acts of evil away from the devil who deserves it onto his innocent son, who doesn't.  Evil, as such, is just as essential to God as the good. So in the same way darkness can only be understood to have meaning when it is seen in contrast with light, so salvation is meaningless unless is it contrasted with a God who will torment you forever, like Jack the Ripper who never dies, torturing a victim who Jack the Ripper can keep alive as long as he wants, so his victim can continue to feel the pain Jack enjoys inflicting on them for his own amusement.  Clearly, since torturing people for all eternity can add nothing to a "perfect" being like God, and certainly has nothing...

 The greatest form of love is to give without any expectation in return. A lesser form of love is to give while expecting something in return and feeling hurt that what was expected was not received.  An even lesser form of love is to give and not only expect something in return, but to then feel justified in punishing someone for failing to give what is expected.  And the lowest form of love is to give and command a person to act and behave in return for that love, in the hope they will be rewarded for doing so or to hope to avoid being tortured for not doing so.    Christianity is a religion that embodies the last three ideas.   Life itself only progresses in every way, however, via the first idea. 

 The irony of claiming to know or understand an infinite and wholly immaterial intelligence called “God” is that no form of animal intelligence is more capable of understanding such an abstraction than any other.  A man’s ability to count to the highest number they can imagine still gets him no closer to infinity than a dog or monkey that can count no higher than two or three. 

 To strive to be "good" for God, in order to prove oneself worthy of salvation, is to engage in a performative act of kindness.  Performative acts of kindness are not genuine acts of kindness, because they are motivated less by a selfless desire to help someone, and more out of a need for approval for helping someone in need.  This is like only helping someone if there is someone around to film it so you can put it on your social media feed in an attempt to attract "likes" and followers. So to, to believe that God is watching our actions to determine we are worthy of salvation, which is like a boss watching our actions to determine whether we should be promoted or fired or a dictator determining whether we should be left alone or imprisoned for thinking the "wrong ideas," is not only to rely on such a perspective to motivate us into "right" or moral behavior, it is to assume that without such motivation, people's natural tendency is to act li...

Faith is often used as a code word for claiming infallibility concerning whatever a person "believes" to be true. Here's an example from Quentin Smith. "So how do theists respond to arguments like this? [The Argument from Evil] They say there is a reason for evil, but it is a mystery.  Well, let me tell you this: I'm actually one hundred feet tall even though I only appear to be six feet tall.  You ask me for proof of this. I have a simple answer: it's a mystery.  Just accept my word for it on faith. And that's just the logic theists use in their discussions of evil."  Quentin Smith, " Two Ways to Defend Atheism "    "Faith," in this sense, means the person is "infallible" in their choice to "believe"  they are telling you a sacred "truth" about themself, despite the listener's own inability to either see evidence that the person is actually 100 feet tall, or to understand, let alone accept ...

 "This crime called blasphemy was invented by priests for the purpose of defending doctrines not able to take care of themselves." [Robert G. Ingersoll]

 "The process of living is meant to de-mask us." "Life is actually set up to tear down your masks. It's set up to make sure that any bunch of bull that we present inside of ourselves, to ourselves, and to others will be torn down." "Eventually we get introduced, whether we want to or not, with our own divinity. Our divine no-thing-ness, invisible presence with no mask, no persona, nobody higher, nobody lower, nobody better, nobody worse. That vast infinite bright shining emptiness that was there all along." "Recognize that life itself is always taking down the masks." ~Adyashanti

 "Christian Science repudiates the evidences of the senses and rests upon the supremacy of God. Christian healing . . . places no faith in hygiene or drugs; it reposes all faith in mind, in spiritual power divinely directed." [Mary Baker Eddy, on Christian Science "healing"] The miracle of a belief in miracles is how often what was considered a miracle to one generation is considered to be an act of nature by another generation; even when both generations are equally Christian in their perspective of the same event. And like Dorothy figuring out the truth of the Wizard of Oz, it is the hand of science that pulls back the curtain of priestly robes who threaten fire and brimstone for failing to believe what they claim is the former, to reveal it to always be the latter.  Plenty of phenomena that were once considered miraculous or unexplainable have since been understood through scientific investigation. For example, eclipses, the movements of celestial bodies, c...

Many Christians like to pretend that they take no pleasure in the thought of those who disagree with them being tortured for all eternity in the torture chamber of hell by their brandname of "God."  Even if this were true, even though some Christians actually admit they enjoy the thought of their enemies being tortured in such a way, the sheer fact that Christians have been trained to accept such horrors as perfectly moral demonstrates why it takes Christianity to teach a perfectly moral child how to either behave like a serial killer, or simply ignore when someone else is doing so, with a clear conscience. This, of course, was how so many Christians simply accepted the burning of their neighbors as "witches" for the sin of thinking outside the box of their sacred brand of beliefs. Just tell them they are on a mission from God and viola! Suddenly genocide is transformed from an evil to being as moral as killing everything on the planet with a flood.  And Christians ...

 The legal system is an example of just how subjective interpretations of any given law can be. So why did God give each of us the infinite capacity for creating subjective interpretations of any given law, and then create a Church through which to promise us rewards or threats for accepting that the only objective interpretation of "God's laws" comes from that church, regardless of how often that Church has broken those laws, and changed its mind about witches and slavery and suicide and the souls of the unbaptized infants burning in hell forever?  "Shut up and just believe it is so, or be tortured for all eternity!" is all the priest can say.

 If everything depends on God, then nothing can exist independent of God. That means neither heaven nor hell can exist independent of God, nor can any of the "souls" that are said to occupy either one.  Such a god only gives life while wanting something in return. That god wants either life long devotees or wants to punish those who failed to become such devotees for all eternity.  According to Christians, this same God is the moral example that all not only should follow, but indeed must follow to save themselves from eternal torments. But to follow the example of such a god is to be willing to torture those who do not devote themselves to him, which is why Christians burned "witches" and "heretics" alike in the name of "love" of their God.  Who's love? Theirs, for their "beliefs," about their idea of what the word "God" means to them, even if it doesn't mean the same thing to anyone else. Of course, to follow such a...

 a fundamental problem with the Christian religion is that it promises a reward in exchange for one's "faith" that it offers humans the best perspective on "moral truth." there are currently over 42,000 different brands of Christianity, however, each of which is sure they and they alone are the best perspective. In fact, like Roman Catholics, each tends to believe their perspective alone is "infallible."   the problem is that such a religion conditions people to give, to others or even a god, with the expectation of getting something in return. and the problem with that is that, the greatest moral truth of all is that it is far more powerful to give without wanting anything in return, the way we may save a child's life from a burning building, than it is to give with the expectation of, let alone feeling entitled in any way to, some reward that surpasses all other possible rewards for "good moral behavior."

 To speak your truth is not the same as speaking your ego, young pueblo points out. your truth is both subjective to you, but as objectively real as our own mind, and our perceptions.  Is grass really green and the sky blue, or do they only look that way when we see them with the kinds of eyes humans are born with, but not necessarily the eyes of other species? An ego is like a suit of armor that we create to protect us from feeling judged for seeing things differently from others, the same way we judge others who see things differently from ourselves. And the more we fear the perspectives that are the most different from our own, the more we see those perspectives as "evil," while the more secure we feel from those perspectives that validate our own, the more we see them as "good." Most egos are forged in the temples of religion, but they can also be forged in the temples of science or finance. All egos are shells of ice, all souls are like steam, and all human min...

 Man is a material being with immaterial thoughts while God is in immaterial being with material thoughts. 

 We have built a world in which every heaven must be built on someone else's hell.

Monotheism is really mono-perceptionism. It is a way of saying one way of looking at the world, and even ourselves, and saying the perspective we have of it all is better than all other possible ways of looking at the world. It is to claim that the ONLY way to interpret what it means to be human is through a Christian lens, even though the 40,000 different versions of Christianity today means even Christians can't agree what the hell that even means, and that any of the infinite number of other possible ways of interpreting what it means to be human are all not only wrong, but a threat to our eternal salvation.   To illustrate this point, consider the story of six blind men and an elephant. If none of the blind men have any idea what an elephant looks like, and each is offering an interpretation based on touching only one of the different features of the animal, then the one who feels the ear might describe an elephant as being like a giant palm leaf, while another who fee...

  it is not love if all they want from you is to fulfill their expectations  young pueblo

  The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter even by a millimeter the way people look at reality, then you can change it.” James Baldwin   

 "I think the task of philosophy is not to provide answers," said Slavoj Zizak, "but to show how the way we perceive a problem can be itself part of a problem."  With Zizak's observation about the problem of perception in mind, just think about how Christianity requires you to accept you are a born sinner, incapable of fixing the broken soul you are born with, and thus requiring God to forgive you for a condition you are born with, lest that same "loving" God threatens to cast you into a fire pit for all eternity for daring to doubt such claims as "infallibly true." Think also about how often women who dared to be non-conformists were accused and executed as "witches," or how often others were accused and executed as "heretics," for daring to think outside of the "sacred" box of acceptable "beliefs" being proscribed in one area of the world or another,  And who is proscribing those "sacred rules...