The Rant Institute

The Christian is found of accusing atheists and humanists of worshiping man, even though it is the Christian who worship man as their true "god." We see this in the fact that Christians everywhere so often crowd into man made temples around the world, and marvel at those great man-made architectures as if they were actually visiting God's house - if God had wanted a house built by human hands, that is.   The Christian gets around the fact that their sacred books are all man made, by claiming it was God who prompted men to write those books in the first place. Ask them how they know it wasn't the devil in disguise who tricked all those men into writing all of those books, and they will look at you as if to say they are quite sure they are smarter than the devil, and that if the devil had ever written a book - it's questionable to them if the devil even knows how to write at all - they would surely have no trouble determining which books they were, and which we...

The Christian craves death more than anything in the world, for only in death can they come to know the God they spend their whole life only dreaming of. To the Christian, after all, God is the greatest celebrity the world has ever known, and their desire to meet so great a star surpasses all other desires combined. This is why Christianity has so often been referred to as a Cult of Death, a fanged wolf masquerading as the Lamb of Life. The images used by Christianity are telling, in this respect. The cross, for example, is a dead tree, fashioned as a torture device by human hands, and upon which is executed a god in the form of a man. The Church that has reigned for the last two thousand years in the name of that heretic, has wrapped itself around the world, claiming that the blood of that heretic will give those who drink it, eternal life. This same church declares to know, "like God, good from evil," which is exactly what the serpent promised to all those who ate of the ...

One of the most striking coincidences of God is how "he" is understood in entirely purely human form, with even the "he" exhibiting a gender that not only implies the existence of both a physical body as well as a the existence of a "she" - hence, calling 'God" a he is to implicitly deny monotheism -  but which is a qualification we never give to any other ideals, or source of energy like light, gravity, wind, etc. This universal willingness to assume that, if indeed any "god" exists at all, that "he" must exist in a way that all human beings can relate to, even if that God is infinity superior to us in every way, is the basis for all religions that "believe" in one god or another. It would surely be impossible to create a religion that worshiped a God that everyone thought was impossible to relate to, which would be like creating a religion to a frying pan.  What's more, by being "infinite," we are ad...

There is no limit to the amount of suffering in the world, despite our continual attempts to assure ourselves that life is a wonderful bounty of gifts for which we should all be eternally grateful.  Indeed, some people are only grateful for the fact that life is temporary, a purgatory among the stars from which one escapes through the door of a coffin. And this is the case in part because, with every desire comes a concomitant amount of suffering that is both proportional and inseparable from the desire itself. The desire for heaven and God, for example, can not be separated from the concomitant suffering that comes from not having obtained such things already, the way hunger is a suffering for food one has yet to acquire or consume.  This is our perennial paradox, for our desires seduce us with the hope of attainment on the one hand, while simultaneously punishing us with desires unfulfilled. Desire, in short, is always both a carrot and a stick, which is why the Buddhis...

We live in a curious world. It's a world where you're not supposed to be depressed about anything, apparently, even if your chihuahua was just flattened by a cement mixer on your way to your best friends funeral, two days after you were diagnosed with a rare form of cancer that will result in your testicles exploding in three weeks.    The solution to this is drugs or God, both of which prey upon the same chemical endorphins in our mind to "save" us from feeling so low, until we become hooked like junkies. There's all kinds of God junkies running around, of course, they're just applauded for it. Like so many drugs today, the Bible or ideas of "God" and eternal paradise, are all things we use to cheer us up about just how miserable the world really is, and how much we really believe death sucks.  Sure, we've all contributed in one way or another to making the world the steamy pile of shih tzu droppings we have to eat for breakfast every m...

Jesus is called "Christ," because he is believed to be enlightened. But is this "enlightenment" something that can simply be handed on, or is it something that one can only find on their own?  The difference between a shaman and a priest, as Alan Watts has pointed out, is that a priest "receives his ordination from his superiors; he receives something from a tradition that is handed down. A shaman doesn't." The shaman receives his "enlightenment" by "going off into the forest by himself."   So when we think about whether Christ was a shaman or a priest, it would take some serious historical revisionism to suggest that a man who fasted in a desert for forty days, who challenged and reinterpreted his own sacred scriptures, and balked as much at the dogmas of his own day as the institutional authorities who declared them, and who was ultimately put to death by those authorities for having done so, was in anyway a "priest....

We are the navel of the world, the axis point from which each of us experiences the universe. Yet no two experiences of that universe are ever the same. This is not only true of each and every single human being who has ever lived, but of every living thing one can imagine, from the atom to the amoeba to the Andromeda galaxy and beyond. In this respect, each living thing experiences a universe unto themselves, including the universe itself, and through this conglomeration of reality tunnels, a single universe contains an infinite multiverse of vastly different experiences. And in this way, the fabric of reality is woven together from an endless loom of contending interpretations.   From each of our positions as the focal point of such an experience, each of us falls through time and space, clawing frantically all the while with our mind to grasp some permanence that we can cling too. The experience of life itself became so precious to us, from the air in our lungs to the thoug...