The Rant Institute

Christians often claim that their condemnation of homosexuality   is an act of “loving the sinner, but hating the sin.” Such a statement necessarily assumes, however, that the person judging the “sin” is somehow qualified to make such a distinction to begin with. That separating the action from the actor first requires condemning both is overlooked by such Christians who, prohibited from throwing stones at the one, cast them instead with righteous abandon at the other.  While this bifurcated standard protects people from physical injury, it can produce deep wounds psychologically and emotionally. It also allows those who accept the standard to, however unintentionally, assume a position of moral righteousness – at least with regards to sexual morality - which allows them to impose judgement on others while immunizing themselves from having to take any responsibility for the fruit of their claims, by passing all personal responsibility for making such judgements to...

The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor.  -Voltaire-  It is said that many (maybe all) serial killers, typically start by killing animals, before they move on to begin killing people. It should be no surprise, then, that in this same way, Lords and monarchs alike, enjoy hunting as much as they do.  Humans are the only creature that claims to believe in a God, someone once wrote, and the only one that acts as if they haven't got one. This contradiction can be seen in no better place than our attitude toward murder.  In the book of Exodus, for example, we see how Moses  - by being as obedient to God as Abraham - is relieved of any responsibility for the savage murders he directs his followers to commit. After receiving the Ten Commandments, Moses comes down from Mount Sinai and sees that his people had built for themselves a Golden Calf. Angered, he breaks the tablets (a fine way to treat holy writ) and proclaims, “...

Envy is as much an engine of Capitalism as it is of Christianity, only it works as a virtue for one and a vice for the other. Capitalism largely runs on getting people to compete with the Jones's, as they say, driving people to forever upgrade to remain 'fashionable.' Christianity runs largely on condemning in people this desire, which not only ultimately never satisfies, but which is such a source of unhappiness as well. Hence, from Monday til Saturday, a person lives in an incubator of advertising that lures them everywhere to consume, like the cleverest serpent that ever lived selling salvation, and then on Sunday, people pile into their church pews to enjoy buying into a baloney sandwich about God and an afterlife, while being castigated for being gullible enough to buy into the baloney sandwich Capitalism has been selling them all week in the first place.     Envy, like God himself, builds our entire world 6 days of the week as the virtue at the heart of the...

The Mandela Effect is the idea that scientists at Cern did experiments involving quantum computing and accidentally merged two different histories from two different but parallel universes. An example is seen in where this "effect" derives its name. While quantum computing, as David Deutsch said in 2005, "will be the first technology that allows useful tasks to be performed in collaboration between parallel universes."  Put these two together, and the world begin to look like the Martrix, Inception, and The Wizard of Oz, all wrapped into one. A number of people claim to remember that Nelson Mandela died in prison during the 1980s, followed by an outpouring of sympathy from celebrities, marches, and even Oprah Winfrey doing a big show about it. Someone even found a text book that clearly stated that Mandela died on July 23, 1991.  The fact that Mandela died in December of 2013, then, is interpreted by people who say they remember him dying in prison, not as ...

We live in a world that we are constantly discovering does not seem to work in anything like the way we have always assumed it did. Mass hypnosis, subliminal messaging, placebo effects, cults, propaganda, MK Ultra, and countless other examples, are all awakening us to the fact that our consciousness does not have as strong a grasp on reality as we have always imagined. On the contrary, both our "sanity" and the nature of reality itself, are not only far more malleable than we may have ever feared to suspect, but neither may work in ways we thought.  One reason for this is the assumption that the world has always been essentially as it is, that time and space and gravity and all of the ingredients in our universe, right down to the smallest parts of an atom, have all been in the same form as they are today, more or less, and have always operated as they do today as well. But there are plenty of reasons to distrust this assumption. Additionally, the ability to be manip...

Only the artist can see beauty in everything, but the world turns people into calculators.

The argument from desire, used so often by Christians to support their belief that their must be a God who is the only one who can fully satisfy all our desires, is used to reach such a conclusion by denying reality. Reality, properly understood and verified in virtual every atom of existence, is a paradox. And perhaps the most salient aspect of the ubiquitous paradox of reality is the paradox of the perfection of unsatisfaction. While the Christian longs for total satisfaction of all of their longings and desires, for total fulfillment of every empty feeling they have ever had or can imagine, such a longing is the same curse that cost Adam & Eve their little Garden, Lucifer his position at the head of all the angels, kings their empires for their lust for ever more, and even the financial institutions for over extending themselves as much as the homeowners of America who had bought more than they could afford. That the Capitalist system necessarily runs on people always w...