The Rant Institute

 There is an irreducible difference between the world and our experience of it. We as human beings do not operate directly on the world. Each of us creates a representation of the world in which we live - that is, we create a map or model which we use to generate our behavior. That map, however similar it may be to that of others, is always unique to ourselves, the way our fingerprint or DNA is similar to others but also unique to ourselves. So too, our definitions and ideas of "God" are just as unique, however similar they may be to the definitions and ideas of others about the same word. Our representation of the world determines to a large degree what our experience of the world will be, how we will perceive the world, what choices we will see available to us as we live in the world.  Religion, however, not only claims that it is the only lens through which the "truth" map or model of the world or ideas of "God" can be known, despite it being wrong in i...

 those who kill and die and sacrifice their life for stories they hold to be sacred or divine or both, as a rule, often know little to nothing about the art of writing, and even less about the art and nature of storytelling. Indeed, the degree to which one is devoted to defending the former is always equal to how deficient they are in the latter. 

 Individuation does not only mean that man has become truly human as distinct from animal, but that he is to become partially divine as well. That means practically that he becomes an adult, responsible for his existence, knowing that he does not only depend on God but that God also depends on man. - Carl Jung, MDR, 408

 “Socrates said, “The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.” He wasn’t talking about grammar. To misuse language is to use it the way politicians and advertisers do, for profit, without taking responsibility for what the words mean. Language used as a means to get power or make money goes wrong: it lies. Language used as an end in itself, to sing a poem or tell a story, goes right, goes towards the truth. A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.” ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

 “Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.”— James Baldwin

 Conservatives are only "pro-life" to the degree to which they fear their own rights are threatened.   How do we know this?  Because if the only "legal" use for a gun was to perform an abortion, they'd all be pro-choice, and treat a womb like a classroom, and insist that life begins at birth, and use the Bible to support such a claim, and deny anything science says to the contrary. 

  There is nothing more animal-like than a clear conscience on the third planet of the Sun. Wislawa Szymborska of Poland won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996. This is the final line of her poem "In Praise of Self Deprecation."  Two kinds of people murder with a clear conscience: the serial killing psychopath and the true believer in a brand of God who is convinced they are doing God's will.  Most Christians deny their religion leads people to act like serial killers, even though that is what their entire religion is based on: Abraham setting out to kill his son, with a clear conscience he is doing so for God (so he can save himself from being tortured for all eternity in hell for daring to question the morality of God's command).