The Rant Institute

A talent for following the ways of yesterday, is not sufficient to improve the world of today.  - King of the Zhou Qin Dynasty in North Eastern China, 307 BCE  

 Nothing can drive a person insane quicker than being raised in a cult in which daring to notice you're in a cult leads all of the cultists that surround you to treat you like you're either insane or duped by the devil for daring to ever think the religion you were raised in is simply an elaborate cult.  Of course, those within the cult, who insist their cult is NOT a cult, are just as convinced that every other religion but their own brand is, in fact, a cult.  Welcome to growing up in my Catholic family, where their Catholic "beliefs" are infallible and your observation that they are not infallible leads your "infallible" family members to need to convince you you're being driven insane by the devil. Mention this to a "true" believer,  especially a few centuries ago, and they'd be sure to burn you alive as a witch or a heretic and be convinced that, for having done so, they deserve eternal pleasures for sending you to a God who is likely...

 Catholicism - a religion that requires you to believe an opinion, no matter how much it is contrary to reason and evidence, is always more true than any and all facts. 

 Catholicism is the belief that if you sacrifice giving into your baser instincts for sex and laziness as a form of  self-denial to a higher purpose and meaning, one embodied in the word "God," then you can sacrifice those who do not believe the same things as you do on the alter of your spiritual righteousness and be both loved by God for having done so, and forgiven by Jesus for being as cruel and homicidal to "unbelievers" as Jesus felt the desire to be toward Jesus for sins you were lured into committing by the devil.   To kill with impunity and in the name of divine justice is to be "like God, knowing right from wrong," for only with such knowledge can the "chosen" righteously decide who should be saved from God's (i.e. their own) wrath, and who deserves hell on earth, as much as they deserve it after death. And only those who are convinced that others deserve hell, are equally convinced that they deserve heaven for "believing"...

 The Catholic Church wants you to "believe" that, in the entire tree of human knowledge, only Catholicism can teach you to know right from wrong as "the one true God" defines right from wrong. Catholicism, in other words, claims to be the cure for our differences in perception - which is the very thing that not only enables us to be unique from each other, but the only reason why anyone can ever create anything unique at all. According to the Bible, a serpent in the "tree of knowledge of good and evil" lured Adam & Eve (stand-ins for the whole human race) into eating its forbidden fruit by getting them to "believe" that by doing so, they "would become like God, knowing right from wrong."  Of course, this implies that they did not know right from wrong before they ate that fruit, so how could they be judged guilty of doing something wrong before they had any ability to know it was wrong?  This is like sentencing an infant to life in ...

   Ask a billion people to define the word 'God' and you'll get a billion different answers.  Ask a Catholic to define the word God and they'll assure that no one can define such a word, for God is the ultimate mystery that explains all else, but anyone who tries to do so without the "infallible" guidance of the Catholic Church telling them how to define such an undefinable word deserves to be boiled alive for all eternity for being so sinfully stupid.

Here is a perfect example of religious "faith" at work. The "belief" that having "faith" in a brand of Christianity makes you a better person inside and out is the opposite of the fact that studies show such a "belief" in such a "faith" often has the opposite effect. But when a person is confronted with a fact that is at odds with their "faith," whether it has to do with the sun and the earth like the days of Galileo or whether it deals with whether Christianity makes you more moral or less, a person of "faith" is required to pick their "faith" over the facts, less they burn forever in hell for failing to do so.  That hell is seen as an afterlife, but it is mostly just the hell that comes from no longer being able to depend on a religion, by people who have never learned how to depend on themself even half as much as they've been commanded to depend upon their religion. See below...   https://www.bustle...

 To love a "God" who suffered and died for the sins of humanity is to hate humanity for the sins that caused the death and suffering of the God you love.  For the "believer," the wrath of God, from this perspective, is when God rightly and justly transfers the death and suffering humanity's sins inflicted upon said God back onto humanity who caused God such death and suffering. Who created that humanity as part of an "intelligent design"?  God.