The Rant Institute

 Fear of meaninglessness is externalized as "faith" in a divine story that gives meaning to those who both need such meaning (to make the carrying of the cross of their own mortality bearable), and who lack the imagination and the courage to create such meaning for themselves.  Ironically, each such person operates under the delusion that the story they hold in their head and heart is the same story shared by billions of other people. In truth, however, each story is only similar in character names and general events, but the meanings and the version of that story is always unique to each person's own imagination.  And even if the story is perfectly true in every respect, the grand illusion is that everyone who feels a need or desire to devote themselves to defending it as true (which is like people devoting their lives to defending the fact the earth revolves around the sun), imagines the story the same way they do.    After all, if a different version o...

 If Jesus came to the US today seeking asylum from being crucified by the Sanhedrin, Christian Conservatives would tell him there's no place for him here until he comes here through the legal process, and send him back to be crucified, and justify his crucifixion in part because of his attempt to come to the US illegally to escape being crucified by the Sanhedrin. 

 Have you ever noticed how the Book of Revelation, if it is interpreted as a prophetic vision of the end of times on earth, only demonstrates that Christianity is a plan that God "intelligently designed" to fail?  This is obvious when we consider that as the last book of the Bible - spoiler alert! - it tells us that God knows his best efforts to "save" humanity are ultimately doomed to fail, leading God to lose his shit and utterly destroy the whole of humanity just to start over with a "new" and better plan. Why didn't God just START with the'New" and better plan to begin with? Why do we see a trend of God repeatedly destroying cities, wiping out creation with a flood, and eventually opting for an apocalypse? Why does God repeatedly punish Humanity for the "sins" He chooses to be so angry about, sins that God could but chooses to never intervene in to prevent or mitigate because we have "free will," but never bothers to si...

🔵 The following passages are taken from a not very widely known interview with Michel Foucault, containing some of the most crucial statements by him on his stance on morals. "In a sense, I am a moralist, insofar as I believe that one of the tasks, one of the meanings of human existence—the source of human freedom—is never to accept anything as definitive, untouchable, obvious, or immobile. No aspect of reality should be allowed to become a definitive and inhuman law for us." "We have to rise up against all forms of power—but not just power in the narrow sense of the word, referring to the power of a government or of one social group over another: these are only a few particular instances of power." "Power is anything that tends to render immobile and untouchable those things that are offered to us as real, as true, as good." "This doesn’t mean that one must live in an indefinite discontinuity. But what I mean is that one must consider all the points...

 “All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes — all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the earth into a graveyard, into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its rememberance. Then we become the grave diggers.” ~Rod Serling, from “Death’s Head Revisited” (1961)

 People are religious to the same degree they feel unsafe. And they feel unsafe to the same degree they are unable to control their environment.

 Have you ever noticed how the immaculate conception of Mary undermines the crucifixion of Jesus?  First, it's important to distinguish the Immaculate Conception of Mary from the Incarnation of Jesus, where Jesus took on human flesh in Mary's womb. Most people confuse the former for the latter.  According to Catholics, the "immaculate conception" of Mary refers to the generative conception of Mary by the sexual relations of her parents. What makes that conception "immaculate" is that, at the moment Mary was conceived through the natural sexual relations of her parents, God decided to preserve Mary's soul from the stain of original sin. Everyone else on the planet, however, who is conceived the same way, is not so lucky. The question is why?  Only Mary, and Mary alone, did God decide to preserve from this stain of original sin from the very first moment of her conception. Why? Well, according to the Catholic Church it's because, in anticipation of...

 Jesus Christ did not suffer for either Judaism or Christianity. Nor did he suffer for his "faith" in any idea of God, or a brand of religion, but for "the sins of the world."  But what do we mean by "the sins of the world"?  For Christians, those "sins" are against their brand-version of the word "God." What offends their brand-version of God is failing to obey rules as defined by their brand-version of a religion called Christianity. Indeed, Jesus was put to death by the leaders and followers of his own religion for failing to conform to their ideas of what he should believe and how he should behave! So why would he come to establish a new religion that he wanted to empower to do the exact same thing, in his name, for the rest of time? The "sins of the world" that Jesus suffered and died for, as such, is all of the suffering that people inflict on each other in the name of their ideas and beliefs, from atheistic Communism to...

 I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use. - Galileo Galilei

 Christianity has two faces: Liberal and Conservative.  Whenever it seeks to use missionaries to plant its seeds into the cultural soil of "virgin" societies, Christianity preaches religious tolerance and claims to stand for peace. When the Anglican Church outlawed Catholicism in England, Catholicism preached religious tolerance. And when missionaries first went to Vietnam to bring the "civilization" of the West, they preached peace. After it has grown to be a tree of knowledge of good and evil that towers over the indigenous trees of knowledge in the cultural soil of the societies it implants itself into, it becomes intolerant and boastful, and begins claiming it is conquering the world for God by converting wayward sinners to the "right" brand of Christianity.  This is why the Anglican Church outlawed Catholicism in the first place, and persecuted Catholics who broke the law of the Anglican God.   It also has two faces of thinking: as the scientist and t...

In Mere Christianity , Christian myth-maker C.S. Lewis sought to reason his way to the existence of a God he desired, (his version only, however, not that of others) by offering his “Argument from Desire.” After his wife Helen passed away, however, Lewis felt as forsaken by God as Jesus on the cross, leading him to conclude that God was a “Cosmic Sadist,” an “Eternal Vet,” and a "Spiteful Imbecile." So, what changed? The answer to that question has to be unpacked in three parts. But first: why does it matter anyway? It matters because, as this argument illustrates only too well, the creative ways we can use our reasoning can lead us to very different answers to this argument. And, as Lewis’s change reflects, our emotions are often the catalyst for more creative ways of thinking. The question all of this raises is whether the answer we reach when considering this argument is one that makes us more dependent upon a brand of religion or ideology, which is like a bird becoming ...

 Faith is the act of believing in things either without evidence or, in some cases, despite the evidence.  Now, faith and stupidity are obviously not the same thing, but there can be some overlap.  And that's a major problem.  Between science and faith, stupidity is something the latter can use much more effectively. Indeed, for faith, stupidity can be the strongest asset, while for science, it is our greatest liability  Yet Christians want us to believe that, to save ourselves from the fires of hell, we must have "faith" that God wants us to depend on our greatest liability as our greatest asset. 

 Neoliberalism is the disenchantment of politics by economics.  Will Davies

 Turning water into wine is a metaphor for turning the oldest lie in history into the most sacred belief of all time.

A priest can dress-up murder to look like a moral imperative by calling the former an act of God's righteous punishment.  And then declare that God's punishment is always an act of God's mercy. 

  "Why God would choose to reveal the truth only to some religious and political middlemen instead of to everybody is perhaps one of those mysterious, wondrous ways God works. But even if God does hand down to a few choice authorities truths about how you should live, how do you know which authorities are the genuine ones? God doesn't extend a hand from the sky and point them out to you. It is conveniently left to the authorities themselves to enlighten you about who the proper authorities are." Daniel Kolak and Raymond Martin,  Wisdom Without Answers , (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1998), p. 93

 Conditioning you to feel pride when you see wealth has the effect of causing you to feel shame when you see poverty. when they Teach you to see white as perfect and beautiful, they teach you to see black as imperfect and ugly.

“Everybody has a plan,” Mike Tyson once said, “until you get punched in the face.” For a lot of us, that punch is Donald Trump: a messianic narcissist who acts like Chucky, thinks like Archie Bunker, and makes the highest office of the land look like an episode of “The Tiger King;” and his comrade, Elon Musk, who runs around the White House like Leatherface in “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” treating Federal employees like a bunch of moochers looking for some gas for their van, laughing about the desolated families and communities he leaves in his wake. The question is how in the hell did we end up here? The answer is fear and greed. That’s why Trump and his team are not only clearing away agencies responsible for protecting the public from corporate malfeasance, but also told the Supreme Court “they can arrest and deport anyone at anytime.” Welcome to “1984” meets “The Handmaid’s Tale.” And despite their rhetoric about needing their guns to defend their liberties against an overreachin...