The Rant Institute

 "Since experiences of God are good grounds for the existence of God, are not experiences of the absence of God good grounds for the nonexistence of God? After all, many people have tried to experience God and have failed. Cannot these experiences of the absence of God be used by atheists to counter the theistic argument based on experience of the presence of God?" Michael Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification , (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), p. 159.

Like turning water into wine or wine into blood, only religion has the power to turn every heaven into a living hell, for it uses fear - which children are born perfectly free of - to crucify to the cross of its dogmas the very guiding light that leads us to every understanding we ever reach: curiosity.  And the only miracle cure that breaks the nails with which religion crucifies our curiosity to the cross of its damned dogmas, by which it unleashes hell on earth through promises to those who lust for a heaven of happily ever afterlife, is to be creative enough, and courageous enough, to trust oneself - regardless of the hell those damned scorpions and vipers in their temples use as threats - just like Jesus did.  

 We live in a society, steeped in religions, that so require us to suppress our authentic selves that the only time that authenticity rears its unwanted head is through anger.  Anger, in other words, is often the only time a person is able to express how they truly feel.

 Religion is the ability of a man who claims "all men have free will,"to then feel he has no choice but use his own free will to force others to obey his commands, by claiming his commands come from God.  Religion, in other words, is the ability of one man to dupe himself into believing he has "free will" and an obligation to ensure you use yours as he sees fit. 

 For those whose faces are turned toward the past, the years roll by unheeded -- their lives unchanged.

  There is no greater sign of ingratitude for this life than the feeling that the only thing that would make it worth living at all is the hope of receiving salvation from a God for having been so often rejected for selling that salvation to others who God had designed with enough "free will" not to want it. 

 "Faith" operates as both a divine justification to stop thinking about an idea, and also a divine command to only think instead about ways to defend why you no longer have to think, and why others should no longer think, about that same idea. 

 When you grow up in a cult, none of the other cult members want you to think differently from themselves. In a cult, thinking differently from the hive is a liability.  When you grow up in a family, thinking differently is valued as an asset, because it offers a different perspective on things, which is especially useful when it comes to solving problems.  Religion steals your family and replaces it with a cult. And when you are the only one who notices the difference between the two, the other cult members blame you for ruining the "family" by daring to disagree with their cult. 

 Any religion in which a God can ask you to sacrifice your child to show your "love" for him cannot be based on anything that has to do with true love. 

 A person who claims to believe the same things at age 55 that they did when they were 5 years old cannot claim to have "grown up" or "put away childish things." In my family, you're persecuted for "putting away childish things" by actually changing your mind.  Religion, as such, is the command to worship Santa Clause under the threat of hell for refusing to believe that only Santa Clause can save you from the Grinch, because neither one of them is real. 

 Religion, and theology more specifically, is designed to make smart people feel stupid, and stupid people feel intelligent, by convincing the former they lack the intelligence to understand what cannot be understood (because "God" is an infinite abstraction), and the latter that they have a special "knowledge" and understanding of something (that they are taught to believe amounts to infallibly"divine wisdom") that effectively operates as nothing more than an elaborate ink blot. 

  Torino is the Italian name for the city of Turin, a city made famous by the Shroud of Turin, which is a perfect example of a religious relic acting like the postcard from 1888. First discovered in 1354, it is believed by many faithful Catholics to be the actual burial cloth of Jesus. On the one hand, it was declared authentic by Geoffroi de Charnay, the dean of the Church of Liery (liar?), France. Like the selling of Indulgences, such a declaration allowed Charnay to begin siphoning extra money out of the pockets of his faithful parishioners and into his own. On the other hand, in 1389, Pierre d’Arcis—the bishop of Troyes, France—sent a report to Pope Clement VII claiming an artist had confessed that the shroud was a “cunningly painted” forgery. The bishop further claimed that the dean of the Lirey church knew it was a fake to begin with, and had used it to raise money anyway. In response, Clement declared the shroud wasn’t the true burial cloth of Christ. Still, he said the Li...

According to astronomers, there are approximately 200 billion trillion stars in our observable universe . And that's just the observable universe, which is likely just a fraction of the universe as a whole. Astronomers estimate there are about 100 thousand million stars in the Milky Way alone. Of those stars, how many possible planets, both Earth-like and other, could there possibly be?  On Earth , all life is based on organic compounds. These molecules are composed of carbon and often include other elements such as hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur. However, scientists have long wondered if alien life might evolve based on significantly different chemistry. For example, researchers have long speculated that silicon might also serve as a backbone for biology.   Self-sustaining chemical reactions that could support biology radically different from life as we know it might exist on many different planets using a variety of elements beyond the carbon upon...

 Every argument offered by Christians in support of the existence of their own brand of God is equally valid in supporting the existence of every other brand of God.  And every argument Christians offer for why other gods do not exist is equally applicable to why the Christian God does not exist.  Hence, every argument a Christian makes in favor of their God also supports the existence of all other Gods, and every argument a Christians makes against other gods is also always an argument for why their own God does not exist either. Hence, the Christian is always the real victim of their own arguments, which is why every time they make them they feel they are being persecuted.    

 Ask a Christian if they would live their life the same way they do now if they knew for certain there was no heavenly reward for doing so, and no hellish punishments for not doing so, and watch as their mind begins doing cartwheels as they try to come up with reasons why they think they would.  But if it is true that the Christian would live the same life they are living now, even without a hope for reward or to avoid the threat of hell, then what reason does the Christian have for thinking they deserve to be rewarded with heaven for living as they do? And why does the Christian likewise think that others deserve to be punished with eternal hell for daring to live differently than the Christian? The incentive to live a certain way that comes from hopes of heaven and fear of hell cannot be separated from how the Christian views the life they have chosen, versus a life they may otherwise have chosen if there was no hope for heaven or fear of hell. Without such hope or fear, wou...

 If everything is part of God's plan, then Adam and Eve sinning against God is as much an intended part of that plan as the devil and his minions offending God and being thrown out of heaven in the first place.  For without our mortality, which we earned through the sin of Adam and Eve seeking eternal life from the serpent so they could "become like God," no one would ever need to pray or depend on God for anything. The only way God could make us to need him, the only way God could make us feel we must depend on him, is if he and he alone can promise us something he and he alone claims he can provide us.  And for Christians, that means the gift of eternal life.  And by obtaining "eternal life," Christians hope to become "like God."  In other words, for the Christian to get to heaven, they have to believe the same lie the serpent told Adam and Eve.  No wonder the pope wears a hat that makes him resemble a King Cobra, and Jesus called the temple priests ...

 It is not the responsibility of the child to teach its parent who they are. It is the responsibility of the parent to create an environment in which the child feels safe enough to become who they are. To a child, only in such an environment can true freedom be experienced and real "free will" be exercised. The parent who creates an environment in which the child feels unsafe to become who they are, where they must pretend to be something they are not in order to avoid being rejected and win the parents acceptance and approval, creates an emotional Skinner box of expectation in which the child's true self is conditioned to perform like a circus animal.  Based on the behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner, a Skinner box is an apparatus for studying instrumental conditioning in animals (typically rats or pigeons ) in which the animal is isolated and provided with a lever or switch which it learns to use to obtain a reward, such as a food pellet , or to avoid a punishment,...

 We are designed to change, and not just our bodies but also our minds and beliefs. Not to do so leads to suffering, for it is the most unnatural sin against human nature to seek to remain the same.  We see this absurdity in those who use copious amount of Botox and plastic surgery to stay young.  Yet those who fear to change their mind cling to the ideas and "beliefs" of the past and justify doing so as honoring tradition.   If it makes changing one's mind a sin punishable by eternal damnation, honoring tradition is simply the Botox of beliefs. For those who refuse to change their beliefs are like people refusing to drive a car because they believe walking is a sacred tradition, because "that's what Jesus did.". And then they blame the suffering of having to walk everywhere on everyone who drives a car.  It's like a religion of walkers who see drivers as devils. The priest's job in such a religion is to convince the walkers they're right, and wi...

 A Catholic priest is someone who goes to school for 4 to 8 years to learn how to never accept or admit that there is no such thing as Santa Claus. And by Santa Claus, of course, we mean the priest's completely human, biased, and limited, version of what the word "God" means, and what it does not mean.  And for their devotion to refusing to ever accept or admit that Santa Claus (i.e. their own version of "God") isn't real, people pay them to live like communists and hold them up as the epitome of intelligence and enlightenment.  Of course, even while they are obligated to claim Santa Claus is 100% real, and to insist that everyone believe them when they proclaim such an "infallible truth," they are equally obligated to insist that the tooth fairies that everyone else may believe in are not only not real, but that anyone who continues to believe in them deserves no less then to be burned alive for all eternity, suffering without end. Amen.    Hence,...

 The problem with my family of Roman Catholics is that they require me to accept their Catholicism as a cure for their problems as infallibly true and that my claim that Catholicism caused and contributed to my own trauma is a delusion (which only their Catholicism can cure). Hence, to have a relationship with my family, I must accept their delusion as valid and my own experience as invalid. And I was told as much by my brother, the Catholic priest. In other words, i must accept their delusion as real and my own realizations as a delusion. To have a relationship with my Catholic family, in other words, I must accept their gaslighting as my only truth and, as a result, rely on their moral compass and distrust my own, for my entire life. For them, however, it isn't gaslighting, because as they see it - they're touched by God with infallibility about their religion. For perspective, it works like this.  My brother and sister insist they know their "God" is real, even as ...