The Rant Institute

For billions of Christians around the world, Easter is not simply the pagan ceremony it always used to be, but is instead, the resurrection of their "Lord & Savior, Jesus Christ." As a result, Christians everywhere contemplate the brutal torture and murder of their dear Jesus, and his subsequent resurrection a few days later, as being the most significant event in all of human history, if not all of history itself, and for all species of animals, aliens, or artificial intelligence as well, in this universe and possibly any other.  But when you think about it, if Jesus really was an infinite and eternal, all powerful, all knowing God, just as much as he was completely human, then all Jesus really did was give up one single weekend, out of an infinite number of weekends.  How many of us have given up a weekend to help someone move, or to cope with the loss of a loved on, or to do any number of other things, even though the total number of weekends even the long...

When we are children, we believe in things like the Easter bunny, the tooth fairy, Santa Clause, and so on, only to grow up and understand that such ideas are more fiction than fact. We discover, in other words, that behind the curtain of each of these characters, is usually our parents. And then, out of ultimate love and respect for our parents, we continue that same facade with our own children, and they in turn with theirs, and so on.  But what if our parents never died? Christopher Hitchens once pointed out that, if we have a father that never dies, then we become permanent children. We are, in other words, infantilized by the notion that we are forever bound to accepting as "true," any and every story told to us by that "all knowing" and "all powerful" father. And this is especially true when we know that, to question any story that eternal "father" tells us to simply "believe," could result in us being thrown into a blast fur...

 Those who claim to know "truth" about God and human nature, simply because they read the Bible, are like a man who claims to have traveled the world because he once read a map.They do not see the "living word," which only exists in the world around them, but the dead letter, which is as bloodless a thing as dry ink on a page. Those who cling as much to their Bibles as their religion only ever worship the law over mankind, even though it was Jesus himself who denounced as "snakes" and "vipers" those proud figures who everywhere exalted themselves through their conspicuous devotion to the former, while sacrificing his own life to defend the meekest of the latter. The "snakes" and "vipers" have always been those who pretend to "be like God, knowing right from wrong," as that most famous of snakes promised Adam & Eve they would. But the stories of the Bible, when simply read and even worshiped, are as morally de...

Music is the religion that all religions try to be. And in their attempts, they almost reach the level of bad comedy.

The purpose of religion is to prevent the exercise of a genuine morality by too many people - one based on empathy and the mutual respect for the absolute autonomy of the individual - by supplanting it with a manufactured morality that is  “intelligently designed” by the architects of a given society. Those architects are always the rich and powerful, who keep and increase their wealth and power by always exempting themselves from having to obey the rules they ensure are imposed on everyone else, and always in stricter terms as one moves down the economic ladder. This is why St Augustine mentioned the difference between Kings and pirates is that one does with an armada what the other does with but a single ship. Modern societies are structured around the ownership of property, for example, but there is never any serious consideration of the legitimacy of the distribution of that ownership, let alone whether property ownership itself is by its very nature immoral. So, people jus...

To believe you are deserving of heaven is to deny you are in anyway responsible for the suffering of others. Instead, if anyone is put off by what you may say, or even how you may say it, it is their own fault. And it is their own fault, because they “can’t handle the truth.” It is equally to assume that you’re own suffering is only ever the fault of others who persecute you for your “beliefs.” And that it is the feeling of being persecuted for those beliefs that validates those beliefs more than anything else. This then proves the Christian is only ever using people to obtain their own salvation, since in the end they have not a single care for anyone who may end up in hell, even if it is their own child, just as long as they make it to heaven.

When Jesus said he could destroy the temple and rebuild it again in three days, without human hands,  it is often asserted by Christians  that he was talking about himself.  The Christian, however, ignores how the tomb he was buried in is likewise a version of  that same temple. The significance of Jesus  exiting the tomb is that it reverses the imprisoning of God in a temple by Solomon. In doing so, Solomon had sealed the God of Israel - a God who was unique among the ancient gods in not being housed in any sort of temple - in  what amounted to an elaborate man made sarcophagus. It was this imprisonment of God by Solomon at David’s behest, which David did for no other reason than that he wanted to secure dynastic rule for himself and his family alone, that was the great “original sin” that broke both the first commandment and the old covenant. In a sense, David’s desire to build a temple was like capturing lightning in a Lyden Jar, which would allow ...