The Rant Institute

 "Since experiences of God are good grounds for the existence of God, are not experiences of the absence of God good grounds for the nonexistence of God? After all, many people have tried to experience God and have failed. Cannot these experiences of the absence of God be used by atheists to counter the theistic argument based on experience of the presence of God?" Michael Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification , (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), p. 159.

Like turning water into wine or wine into blood, only religion has the power to turn every heaven into a living hell, for it uses fear - which children are born perfectly free of - to crucify to the cross of its dogmas the very guiding light that leads us to every understanding we ever reach: curiosity.  And the only miracle cure that breaks the nails with which religion crucifies our curiosity to the cross of its damned dogmas, by which it unleashes hell on earth through promises to those who lust for a heaven of happily ever afterlife, is to be creative enough, and courageous enough, to trust oneself - regardless of the hell those damned scorpions and vipers in their temples use as threats - just like Jesus did.  

 We live in a society, steeped in religions, that so require us to suppress our authentic selves that the only time that authenticity rears its unwanted head is through anger.  Anger, in other words, is often the only time a person is able to express how they truly feel.

 Religion is the ability of a man who claims "all men have free will,"to then feel he has no choice but use his own free will to force others to obey his commands, by claiming his commands come from God.  Religion, in other words, is the ability of one man to dupe himself into believing he has "free will" and an obligation to ensure you use yours as he sees fit. 

 For those whose faces are turned toward the past, the years roll by unheeded -- their lives unchanged.

  There is no greater sign of ingratitude for this life than the feeling that the only thing that would make it worth living at all is the hope of receiving salvation from a God for having been so often rejected for selling that salvation to others who God had designed with enough "free will" not to want it. 

 "Faith" operates as both a divine justification to stop thinking about an idea, and also a divine command to only think instead about ways to defend why you no longer have to think, and why others should no longer think, about that same idea.