The Rant Institute

 One can be no more separated from a god that is the very substance of the universe than they can be separated from time and space, or an atom can separate itself from the universe on the whole. 

The miracle of Christianity is very simply demonstrated by the power it has to make a negative into a positive.  A person who claims to be a Christian often does so with pride. In fact, for many, being a Christian is the greatest thing about them, without which they feel they are nothing at all.  But to be a Christian, you must accept that there is something fundamentally and irreparably wrong with you that God could fix, but chooses instead to only treat, in order to keep you dependent upon a Church run by people who likewise are irreparably flawed, while convincing you that doing so is something you should not only be proud of, but should seek to convert others to doing.  This is like being proud of being a drug addict and wanting everyone else to claim to be a drug addict as well. Only the drug addiction can never be fixed, it can only be replaced with a purer drug - God! Welcome to my family. 

 “Faith” of the religious variety is like both the wizard of Oz and a curtain, behind which are three words that for some people are by far the scariest words ever spoken, and especially to have to admit and accept.  For others who have faced their fears of those words, naked and unafraid, and accepted unflinchingly whatever cost such words require as merely the price of all true liberation, they are the only path to true wisdom, awe, love, truth, and gratitude just to be alive. What are those three words?  “I don’t know.” 

Teaching children to believe they are born with the stain of original sin on their souls is a way of teaching a child  they are only worthy of being "saved" from the fire of hell through their willingness to confine their infinite curiosity and creativity within the dogmas offered by their brand of religion.  This is like telling a child to believe that the sin of having two legs can only be forgiven by walking in a straight line, and only in the direction their religion requires, for doing anything else with your own two feet is an offense to a God who doesn't have legs because he's completely immaterial. 

  Last time we looked at how filicide can be interpreted as both good and evil, just by changing the names from Jack and Danny Torrance to Abraham and Isaac. In contrast to religion, science sees Jack and Abraham to be as insane as David Berkowitz, the serial killer dubbed the Son of Sam after claiming his killing spree was in obedience to commands from his neighbor’s dog, Sam. And to transform Berkowitz from Jack into Abraham like water into wine, all we need is the right story, a will to "believe, "and another 4000 years. Thanks to a man with memory problems, we now know how turning a serial killing psychopath into a religious saint reflects the dualistic nature of memory. Since memorizing scriptures is one way to prove oneself worthy of salvation, religion would have colored that man more as a witch or pawn of the devil.  Yet, by enlightening us about how memory really works, he shed some light on how great sins can become holy sacraments of obedience with enough time. ...

 Christians and atheists have very different ideas of what it means to have, and more importantly to exercise, one's "free will" with regards to what and how a person is allowed by "God" to think.  The easiest way to understand this difference is to think about the nature of how freely a person can use their imagination and creativity as being the mental equivalent to how freely a person can use their own body. An atheist sees their mind as something with which they can dance, run, skip, walk, swim, jump, or anything else. In the same way they can use their body however they wish, so they can use their mind the same way.  The Christian sees their mind as being "intelligently designed" to do all those things, of course, but also believe that, to show the "creator" of such a mind and body they deserve to be saved from eternal tortures, they are required to "believe" in a particular version of their Christian religion, and if they don...

 The simple difference between science and religion.  Science requires you to change your understanding to fit reality. Religion requires you to change reality to fit your "beliefs," while insisting everything science discovers about reality that conflicts with your beliefs is a lie, because your "beliefs" are always infallible, because they come from God.  So what happens when the religious person encounters a scientist who dares to interpret what is often ambiguous information in a way that does not confirm or conform to the religious person's view of reality?  The religious person becomes convinced that the evidence is clear and unambiguous, and anyone who claims otherwise deserves to be tortured for all eternity, and anyone who agrees (even if they don't really believe it) deserves eternal pleasures for choosing to "believe" rather than question or be curious.  The end.

"If Jesus had been killed 20 years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little Electric Chairs around their necks instead of crosses" [Lenny Bruce]

 Christianity is a religion that requires you to glorify the gift of "free will" by only using your free will to act like being born is just like joining the military, that is, "God's army!" It is to glorify "free will" by deciding to only act like a robot.  This is like glorifying the gift of being able to move as freely as one wishes, to dance and run and jump and skip and so on, by only crawling, on one's hands and knees in supplication, in a straight line, straight to church and home again.  It's like being given play-doh as a gift, which you are free to shape into whatever you wish, and then being told by the person who gave you the play-doh that if you dare to mold it into anything other than in the image and likeness of the person who gave you the play-doh, that "gift-giver" will be so offended that they will feel perfectly justified in not only torturing you to death for doing so, but in keeping you alive as long as they can s...

Jesus was NOT the first man to "rise from the dead," as if rising from the dead were a more powerful or convincing show of divinity than simply freeing himself from a cross, or even doing to Pilate what Moses had done to the Pharaoh.  One of the arguments offered by Celsus, one of the pagan philosophers against Christianity was that it was pretending to be something it wasn't - something new. Celsus was a Conservative intellectual among Roman pagan philosophers. Like so many Conservatives today, his arguments for NOT accepting the new Jesus religion as valid are EXACTLY what Conservative Christians would argue for NOT accepting a NEW Jesus religion today. As for rising from the dead....   "They say that Zalmoxis, the slave of Pythagoras, also did this among the Scythians, and Pythagoras himself in Italy, and Rhampsinitus in Egypt. The last named played dice with Demeter in Hades and returned bearing a gift from her, a golden napkin. Moreover, they say that Orpheus di...

  The Catholic Church has long defended and practiced pederasty. In addition to the great St. Thomas Aquinas supporting pederasty, in 1531, Martin Luther upbraided Pope Leo X [1] for having vetoed a measure that cardinals should restrict the number of boys they kept for their pleasure, "otherwise it would have been spread throughout the world how openly and shamelessly the Pope and the cardinals in Rome practice sodomy." [2]     Nor was Leo the only one.    Guided by Aquinas’s divine perspective on the legitimacy of pederasty, Pope Benedict IX was famous for debauching young boys in the Lateran Palace, leading Saint Peter Damian to describe him as “a demon from hell in the disguise of a priest.” Pope Julius II (1503-13), who commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling, caught syphilis from Rome’s male prostitutes. Pope Boniface VIII (1294-1303), known as a pedophile who massacred the entire population of Palestrina, even famously declared ...

 "When Christianity gained control of the Roman Empire it suppressed the writings of its critics and even cast them into flames." Robert L. Wilken, The Christians As the Romans Saw Them (New Haven: Yale, 1984), p. xii.

 "To think that the ruler of the universe will run to my assistance and bend the laws of nature for me is the height of arrogance. That implies that everyone else (such as the opposing football team, driver, student, parent) is de -selected, unfavored by God, and that I am special, above it all." Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1992), p. 109. What could be more arrogant than to believe in miracles? To believe that the supreme ruler of the universe has not only bent the laws of nature by which everyone else is bound, but that such a ruler did so as a special favor to you, and also as a special message and invitation to you, which that ruler intentionally withholds from everyone else.  Even the person who believes they know something is a miracle believes that their knowledge of miracles is itself a special knowledge, amounting to a kind of miracle in and of itself, that the God who performed the miracle bestows to his chosen ...

  When we form images of God, they are all really exhibitions of our lack of faith, as Alan Watts pointed out. They are merely something to hold onto, something to grasp, which is like grasping at water because we feel like we are drowning, or grasping at air because we feel like we are falling. Grasping hold of such images are not acts of faith in the image being held onto to, but faith in our ability to refuse to let go of the images to which we grasp, like a child refusing to let go of their mother's hand at the public library or swimming pool.   It is only when we don’t grasp, like a young bird that leaves the nest trusting its wings will allow it to glide upon the air rather than crash to the earth, only then are we exercising an attitude of true faith. Everything else is a brand, used for identifying cattle and slaves and sheep, as to what plantations they belong.