The Rant Institute

  “Addiction is always a poor substitute for love.” Gabor Mate   In part three of Understanding Religious Trauma, we consider the idea of neuroception, and how the effects of the two very different kinds of “love” – the genuine thing and the “near enemy” of attachment that is its mirrored opposite – can not only wreak havoc on a child’s emotional development, but do so by initiating an addiction to a religious brand of approval and attachment masquerading as divine "love;" an addiction that, because it is seen as the ultimate good and the source of all order and virtue, can lead people to justify any evil needed to maintain it. Recall that in our last article we explained how feelings of guilt and shame effect our sense of safety and self-worth, with the former leading us to feel we are fundamentally good people who may have done something bad, like steal some candy from the local store, and the latter leading us to feel there is something fundamen...

 The difference between philosophy and religion is that the former venerates our creative capacity to ask the kinds of questions that lead us to new insights and understandings, especially about ourselves and our differences, as the greatest of virtues, while the latter treats such an ability as the greatest vice.  In doing so, the former sees the unknown as the playground of curiosity, while the other sees the unknown as something to be feared, and never to be entered, unless one does so only while hiding behind a god.

"Not only does the application to horrors of such generic and global reasons for Divine permission of evils fail to solve the second problem of evil; it makes it worse by adding generic prima facie reasons to doubt whether human life would be a great good to individual human beings in possible worlds where such Divine motives were operative. For, taken in isolation and made to bear the weight of the whole explanation, such reasons-why draw a picture of Divine indifference or even hostility to the human plight. Would the fact that God permitted horrors because they were constitutive means to His end of global perfection, or that He tolerated them because He could obtain that global end anyway, make the participant's life more tolerable, more worth living for him/her? Given radical human vulnerability to horrendous evils, the ease with which humans participate in them, whether as victim or perpetrator, would not the thought that God visits horrors on anyone who caused them, simp...

 Those who believe in the personification of evil often come to embody that evil out of a fear of it. Ironically, then, the belief in the personification of evil in the form of a devil or demon, leads people to personify the evil they fear as a way of defending against it.  This was the entire basis for the burning of witches and heretics, for example. Nor can love for a "savior" ever grow out of a fear of a devil or the eternal torments of hell, especially when that "savior" is responsible for creating and maintaining the existence and the threat posed by both.   In this, the Christian believes they have an enlightened and perfectly logical understanding, a high-minded rational that the less enlightened cannot understand, even though fear impairs the higher cognitive functions on the one hand, and "love" is a feeling that, by definition, is irrational.

 Freedom of religion is mostly about the freedom to use religion to discriminate, coerce, and control people who do not accept the religion that "believers" choose to "believe" is infallible. A belief in one God who requires the practice of a single religion is a spiritual "ghost" that reflects a belief that democracy is evil, because humans are born with the stain of original sin that not only renders them incapable of making moral decisions but ensures that democracies will always choose their sinful nature over obeying "God" - and by "obeying God" we simply mean obeying the "one true faith": The Roman Catholic Church.   

 Catholicism is a form of psychosis that occurs when groups of people take their imaginations too seriously.

 Catholicism is the art of living in an alternate reality in which your "faith" is the only credible evidence needed to justify anything you believe, including the "belief" that genocide is perfectly moral whenever it is done by God or for God by God's "chosen people," and then heartily condemning anyone and everyone else who dares to do the EXACT same thing as evil and/or totally insane, UNLESS they likewise claim to believe such things under the "Catholic" brand name.  Catholics often throw their righteous stones of judgements at people who claim to be transgendered, for example, even though there is far more evidence that supports such a claim, even as they claim to believe they will live forever in heaven and anyone who dares to doubt them and their "infallible" beliefs will be roasted alive for all eternity - just so their "God" can show both the saved and the damned how much he truly loves them.  Is there any evidenc...

 Those who can only love themselves by loving a God can never know true love, nor their true self, let alone anything worthy of the label “God.”

 Christianity is a form of ritualized and moralized dependency masquerading as "worship," not of God directly, but of God's preferred  brand of a religion. A Roman Catholic Christian, for example, is dependent not on God, but on the belief that the Roman Catholic Church best proscribes the ways that God desires to be worshiped by fallible humans.  And only be worshiping said "God" as proscribed by Roman Catholicism, can the Catholic Church operate as a divine conduit and spiritual umbilical cord, through which God nourishes the spiritually sick children he alone chooses to create, the chemo therapy for the cancer of "original sin" he ensures their souls are stained with, through sacraments that treat the symptoms of sin, but never cure it.

 A good conservative Catholic is morally obligated by their faith to believe that the world is coming to an end, not because of climate change or economic degradation caused by "the love of money," which the Bible calls the root of all evil and modern economics calls "the profit motive," but because the Virgin Mary is appearing to true believers to warn them of what they have always believed to begin with: that God is so pissed off about gay marriage that he's about to treat the whole planet like Sodom and Gomorrah.  The world is not ending because of greed, in other words, but because of God as punishment for people using their "free will" in their sexual desires. Hey, well at least he's keeping good to his word that he wouldn't destroy the whole planet with a flood again, just parts of it, and the rest with fire and brimstone. 

 To believe in the Catholic concept of "God" is to be so impressed with your own intelligence that you are convinced it could have only been designed by a God while at the same time being equally sure that the majority of human beings who have ever lived are too stupid to understand why they should be Catholic.  

 Catholicism is the art of hiding the undefinable qualities of  its own brand of the word "god" behind a curtain of rhetoric while simultaneously using reasoning to pull back the curtain of rhetoric used by other brands of religions who, like Catholicism, are forced to depend on the same curtain to sell their brand.   Catholicism then denies that it depends on such a double standard while also accusing everyone else of only ever using such a double standard. When the Catholic uses such rhetoric,  they call it divine revelation or sacred, while accusing everyone else of pure sophistry.  Catholics have always silenced those who have dared to point out their double standards by murdering them and blaming the murders they commit on their brand of God. 

 Let's "focus on what is, I believe, the major weakness of the argument based on the analogy between God and the loving parent. What happens when a loving parent intentionally permits her child to suffer intensely for the sake of a distant good that cannot otherwise be realized? In such instances the parent attends directly to the child throughout its period of suffering, comforts the child to the best of her ability, expresses her concern and love for the child in ways that are unmistakably clear to the child, why it is necessary for her to permit the suffering even though it is in her power to prevent it.  In short, during these periods of intentionally permitted intense suffering, the child is consciously aware of the direct presence, love, and concern for the parent, and receives special assurances from the parent that, if not why, the suffering (or the parent's permission of it) is necessary for some distant good."  William L. Rowe, "The Evide...

 One of the favorite arguments offered by Christians for the existence of their brand of "God" is the cosmological argument.  This argument does nothing to clarify which of the more than 40,000 different versions of the Christian God is the real slim shady, but Christians don't care about that, they just care about finding any reason they can think of for why their God is real and everyone else's is offensive to them and their "God." A “cosmological” argument is any argument for a God’s existence that’s based on the mere existence of the cosmos, the universe. Simply put, the reasoning of this argument claims that, since the cosmos exists, only God could have created it. Put another way, because the Christian can't imagine any other "creative force" being responsible for causing the universe but their own ideas about God, their own ideas about God must be the only  "creative force" capable of creating the cosmos. Welcome to the mirac...

 Religion in a nutshell:  "My God is real because I choose to "believe" that he is real, and you're god is fiction because I also choose to "believe" it is a fiction, and when a person puts these two "beliefs" together, they become - at least to the person choosing to "believe" these two ideas - infallible "fact."  And for the person choosing to believe their "beliefs" are infallible facts, they will say "if you don't accept my "beliefs" about your "beliefs" then I will interpret that as an outright attack on my religious freedoms, because my "beliefs" require me to force you to behave in ways acceptable to the God I choose to believe is real.  I will also call you a heretic and a blasphemer and feel perfectly justified in torturing and even killing you for NOT rejecting your own ideas and beliefs out of a preferred dependence upon MY beliefs, the same way my God tortures and kil...

 Criticism of Religion — Bertrand Russell “I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out. I regard it as a disease, as belonging to the infancy of human reason, and to a stage of development which we are now outgrowing.” — Bertrand Russell, Free Thought and Official Propaganda (1934) “RELIGION: A set of beliefs held as dogmas, dominating the conduct of life, going beyond or of contrary to evidence, and inculcated by methods which are emotional or authoritarian, not by methods intellectual." — Bertrand Russell, Uncertain Paths to Freedom: Russia and China 1919-22, p. 197 “Religion prevents our children from having a rational education; religion prevents us from removing the fundamental causes of war; religion prevents us from teaching the ethic of scientific co-operation in place of the old fierce doctrines of sin and punishment. It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so, it will be ne...

 Hell is the Christian belief that a God who preaches forgiveness and requires us to turn the other cheek is perfectly justified in deciding to remain so offended by the actions of an ant that he decides to give that ant eternal life just so he can continue to burn it with a magnifying glass for all eternity - and then blames the ant as deserving its suffering for being created as an ant and not an angel! And Christians call the "free will" the ant has, and the free will God has to torture that ant for how it freely choose to use its free will, "true love."   But this  is only "true love" if the Christian God is Quinton Tarantino.

There is a simple and important difference between religion and 'God' that is lost on those who think their religion is the only way to understand the meaning of the word "God."  The three major monotheistic religions all proclaim God to be infinite. Think about that in terms of numbers. Since we can use numbers to count to infinity, any single number a person can imagine is equally as valid as any of the other infinite number of numbers a person can think of in counting to infinity.  The three major monotheistic religions, however, insist that only the way they define such an "infinite" God are true, even though they all contradict each other. One proclaims God is only even numbers, for example, while the other proclaims God is only odd numbers, and the third claims God is an infinite number of fractions, of which there are more than whole numbers.  What about negative numbers? Negative numbers like -42 are the opposite of positive numbers, so, even though ...

 Christianity convinces you you should feel ashamed of yourself for being creative enough to imagine your own personal version of what the word "God" means to you. And it wants you to believe you should feel especially ashamed of yourself if your own definition of the word "God" falls outside the parameters it uses to box in such an infinite abstraction.  Those parameters act like a skeleton onto which any image can be fashioned, whether it's in the form of flesh and blood like Jesus, or a Holy Ghost and heavenly father, "who art in heaven." And by "art" we mean the creative capacity we have to "believe" such a thing is as true as a four year old believing in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy.  Such parameters also hide  from Christians the fact that each person is looking at a magnified projection of their own ideals, which are therefore as unique as they are, like they are looking in a fun house mirror that makes you infinitely larg...

 “I am a great friend of chaos. It’s all we have. I mean, this whole concept of being able to manage life…life is risk, life is chance, life is being open to chance. The best things in my life, and probably in anybody’s life, come out of being open to being blown off course.” Tilda Swinton

 Christianity condemns casual sex and masturbation as perhaps the greatest sin. It's one of the famed seven deadly sins, in fact, the sin of lust. Hell, Jesus said even just the thought of lust is a deadly sin. On the other hand, it also champions the act of praying as one of the greatest virtues.  But consider the curious contrast between prayer and masturbation.  While Christianity sees casual sex as purely physical and devoid of emotion, the act of praying is purely emotional devoid of anything physical. One connects a person to their entire body and all of their sensations, while the other disconnects a person from their body and imprisons them in the tower of ideals within the locked room of their own mind. Praying is a way of asking someone else (God or a saint or an angel or jinni) to do something on your behalf, while telling yourself there's either nothing else you can do anyway, or that praying is the best thing you can do regardless of whatever else you could d...

 “To the living, I am gone, To the sorrowful, I will never return, To the angry, I was cheated, But to the happy, I am at peace, And to the faithful, I have never left. I cannot speak, but I can listen. I cannot be seen, but I can be heard. So as you stand upon a shore gazing at a beautiful sea, As you look upon a flower and admire its simplicity, Remember me. Remember me in your heart: Your thoughts, and your memories, Of the times we loved, The times we cried, The times we fought, The times we laughed. For if you always think of me, I will never have gone.” ~Margaret Mead