The Rant Institute

 There is an irreducible difference between the world and our experience of it. We as human beings do not operate directly on the world. Each of us creates a representation of the world in which we live - that is, we create a map or model which we use to generate our behavior. That map, however similar it may be to that of others, is always unique to ourselves, the way our fingerprint or DNA is similar to others but also unique to ourselves. So too, our definitions and ideas of "God" are just as unique, however similar they may be to the definitions and ideas of others about the same word. Our representation of the world determines to a large degree what our experience of the world will be, how we will perceive the world, what choices we will see available to us as we live in the world.  Religion, however, not only claims that it is the only lens through which the "truth" map or model of the world or ideas of "God" can be known, despite it being wrong in i...

 those who kill and die and sacrifice their life for stories they hold to be sacred or divine or both, as a rule, often know little to nothing about the art of writing, and even less about the art and nature of storytelling. Indeed, the degree to which one is devoted to defending the former is always equal to how deficient they are in the latter. 

 Individuation does not only mean that man has become truly human as distinct from animal, but that he is to become partially divine as well. That means practically that he becomes an adult, responsible for his existence, knowing that he does not only depend on God but that God also depends on man. - Carl Jung, MDR, 408

 “Socrates said, “The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.” He wasn’t talking about grammar. To misuse language is to use it the way politicians and advertisers do, for profit, without taking responsibility for what the words mean. Language used as a means to get power or make money goes wrong: it lies. Language used as an end in itself, to sing a poem or tell a story, goes right, goes towards the truth. A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.” ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

 “Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.”— James Baldwin

 Conservatives are only "pro-life" to the degree to which they fear their own rights are threatened.   How do we know this?  Because if the only "legal" use for a gun was to perform an abortion, they'd all be pro-choice, and treat a womb like a classroom, and insist that life begins at birth, and use the Bible to support such a claim, and deny anything science says to the contrary. 

  There is nothing more animal-like than a clear conscience on the third planet of the Sun. Wislawa Szymborska of Poland won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996. This is the final line of her poem "In Praise of Self Deprecation."  Two kinds of people murder with a clear conscience: the serial killing psychopath and the true believer in a brand of God who is convinced they are doing God's will.  Most Christians deny their religion leads people to act like serial killers, even though that is what their entire religion is based on: Abraham setting out to kill his son, with a clear conscience he is doing so for God (so he can save himself from being tortured for all eternity in hell for daring to question the morality of God's command). 

Human Universals is a book by Donald Brown , an American professor of anthropology ( emeritus ) who worked at the University of California, Santa Barbara . It was published by McGraw Hill in 1991. Brown says human universals, "comprise those features of culture, society, language, behavior, and psyche for which there are no known exception." According to Brown, there are many universals common to all human societies. One of those universals is ambivalence. Ambivalence is having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone. And this applies to no one and nothing as much as God and the devil God of the Christian Bible, through a willingness to use violence and torture to punish and teach wayward sinners, therefore creates a universal problem for all of humanity, for which there is no possible solution.  What's the problem?  Well, every act of violence can always lend itself to interpretation, even by people who may be quite insane. Abraham's w...

A theodicy is a philosophical argument that attempts to explain why evil exists in a world created by a good God . The term comes from the Greek words theos (God) and dike (justice). Theodicy attempts to address the problem of evil, which arises when all power and goodness are attributed to God. Theodicy attempts to show how God's goodness and justice can be upheld in the face of evil, and to provide a framework that makes the existence of both God and evil plausible. Theodicy differs from a defense, which only shows that the coexistence of God and evil is logically possible. Some Christian thinkers reject any attempt to judge God's actions or fathom God's purposes by human standards. But this is like arguing that a dog has no right to judge the actions of its owner when that owner beats the dog or sets it on fire. The German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz coined the term "theodicy" in 1710. Leibniz's work, Essais de Théodicée sur la b...

 The belief that eternal pleasures await as a reward for having lived life as obediently as possible is an admission of not only how hard life is, but how much a person resents having to endure it.  Expecting heaven in the afterlife, in other words, is an act of ingratitude for this life.  And a belief in hell is to believe that those who did not perform such a test of life - a test they were never asked to participate in and from which there is no escape, not even death - with a passing grade by a grader who has demonstrated "his" willingness to punish the innocent and reward the guilty (Adman and Eve were thrown out of the garden of Eden, for example, which meant the serpent was rewarded for his lies with being the king of the jungle) deserve no less than eternal torments. For St Augustine, any infant or fetus who died before they were baptized had failed the test of life and damn well deserved their eternal sufferings as a result, for who can ever question God and his ...

 It is most laughable and terrible to discover that people have killed and died by the millions over differences in definitions of the word "God" - a paradoxical word that, more than any other word in the human language, is both the simplest to understand yet the most impossible to define - when even the United States Supreme Court has admitted it is incapable of defining what constitutes pornography, it just "knows it when it sees it."  Yet unlike pornography, God remains as impossible to see as the word "God" is impossible to define. Sure, you can look at the world or the stars and imagine what you are seeing is "God," but you can just as easily imagine it to just be stuff that people imagine to be "God." And even when we chose to imagine the former, it brings us no closer to understanding how to define such a word than we understand the universe we are peering into. Like pornography,  "God" stimulates countless numbers of p...