The Rant Institute

We can only change our future by facing our past.

The first great form of violence is war, and the second is ecomincs . One is like putting a bullet through the brain and the other turns  life into a hopeless drug addict.

I believe in free thinking, even if it may be more likely to lead humanity to its own destruction than our ideologies and religions - a proposition that defies both belief and history - because everything else is a form of bondage based on a lie.

there's nothing like an old familiar song taking you to a whole new place.

I was in a discussion over the weekend with some people about whether Artificial Intelligence would usher in the renaissance or ruin of human evolution. But AI - if it were truly an "intelligence" and not a robotic machine - would not only be simply the echo chamber of our collective ignorance and fear, paradoxes and contradictions, but one amplified beyond our ability to ever understand - especially when we are clearly so incapable of having any serious  understanding of our own, and general consensus has historically always demonstrated a strong preference for believing easy lies to a hard truths. And more importantly, it would also have to have free will. And how can you create that, when our own intelligence is so incapable of determining once and for all whether we have one or the other, or the degrees to which we operate with both.       

Only a human being who thinks of himself as a "god" would want their name and their story praised by all other human beings for the rest of history, whether that person is Julius Caesar, Jesus Christ, or Adolf Hitler. A god caring about whether people worship him or call him by the right name is like a person obsessing about whether ants in his backyard do the same thing, and threatening to open up the hose on them if they don't.

The theist is incapable of distinguishing the difference between their love for a deity and their fear of that same deity, or between whether their beliefs are motivated more by their hope for heaven or fear of hell, but they are quite confident that having both makes them wiser and more moral than the atheist who eschews the need for either one.