Can God cure as well as kill? Should God kill or cure?

The Cathar Church is as close as we get, but it is devoid of the nonsense about members being god. About Us – The Cathars The churches that come closest to your hermetic/gnostic views are the I Am Society, the Neo-Luciferian Church, and the Hermetic Temple of Thoth. Any Gnosticism that is involved seems to by the Sethian/Ophite variety, which would fit with your snake avatar; but the Greatest Am moniker is characteristic of the I Am society. You could, of course, provide the web address of the group you're talking about and clear the matter up.

 

It appears that the Cathar Church in the link is based on the work of one man, John Bogomil. I didn't spend much time there, but a brief look at the books they sell makes me think they buy into at least some of the 19th century 'add-on' myths surrounding the Cathars, such as the Holy Grail beng a lost Cathar treasure.Other stuff on their about us page makes me wonder a bit too. Nonetheless it looks relatively harmless on the surface..but who knows...


I dont think Greatest is going to reveal his affiliations - he probably feels that keeping it a secret empowers him in some way. Or maybe he's just a loner with crazy and inflated ideas.

 

https://www.************/gnosticottawa/

I guess that facebook pages cannot be linked to. You will have to google --- Gnostic Church of Ottawa-Gatineau

Regards
DL

 

From the rescources page of Gnostic Church of Ottawa- Gatineau:

"A Manual for the Gnostic is a comprehensive resource on the creeds, doctrines, and sacraments of the French Gnostic Church, including rare historical texts which have never before been translated and compiled. This Manual provides many prayers and meditations suitable for Gnostics and mystically minded Christians. Included are instructions for finding one’s Patron, Guiding, and Teaching Angels, rituals of spiritual protection, and techniques for enhancing the feeling of God's presence in one's life."


Those 'teaching anglels' sound terribly 'supernatural'.

This does too, from 'The Nature of the Gnostic Church'

"To the problem of incarnation the Gnosis answers: The Aeon Christ descended from the Divine Pleroma and incarnated in Jesus to save Psychics of good will, but once his predication was finished, he entered into the bosom of the Pleroma and did not suffer the tortures of Golgotha."

The Church itself appears to be one of th 19th century French revivals.

The Gnostic Catholic Apostolic Church - Primacy of North America

 

I does sound supernatural doesn't it.

Who is your teaching angel if not your Father Complex?

That is how I interpret what they are saying. I do agree after chatting with that church that they seem to use and read the Gnostic myths literally. The California church seems to do the same. If so, it just shows the diversity that has always existed in Gnostic circles.

If you do not believe in the supernatural, why would you think that I or anyone else should?

Do you think supernatural based thinking to be good thinking?

Regards
DL

 

You said you were finished talking to pathetic BBB, but I guess not.

Do I think supernatural based thinking is good thinking? It depends on what you mean by natural and supernatural.

Most cultures have mystics who seek to go beyond the limitations of ordinary nature. My own belief is that there is an eternal and perfect spirit of which we are not aware in our ordinary consciousness.To become aware of it is the goal of the spiritual path. Obviously that means I think differently from a person who doesn't have any such orientation.

 

I meant we were done wherever I wrote that. Thanks for reminding me. If you want it everywhere, just say so.

Eternal spirit, if you do not just mean life, and thought it sentient, would be supernatural for sure.

I prefer to follow science and seek my Father Complex. I think that that area of our minds is where the mystics want us to end.

Just looking at the creation painting and where God is sitting tells us to look into our own minds.

Regards
DL

 

One of the problems I used at one time to think that Gnosticism or some partial return to it might solve is the loss in western cuture of the Divine Feminine - the Mother. It seems that with the advent of Christianity the Goddess was pretty much thrown out. The Gnostics certainly had powerful feminine figures in their mythos,very probably derived from both ancient Jewish and Pagan roots. True, the Catholics and Orthodox still have Mary, but she's not a Goddess, only a saint. Protestantism went even further and got rid of Mary too.

In a sense this is symbolic as the divine is really without gender. As Hinduism says in some of it's modes, Brahman is unknowable to the mind, so the divine manifests in these forms in order that we humans can have some focus for our efforts to know God.

But I guess the idea is that the 'father' is too logical, narrow, strict, and as with your own favourite Yaweh, the concept has been thoroughly abused over centuries.The mother is more intuitive, loving, softer perhaps.

But if you think it's all just psychology, to grasp the symbolic ought to present no problem. Maybe you'd be happier as Jungian than a Gnostic. Most modern Gnostic revivalists I've looked into seem to believe in what you term supernatural.

 

Now I think we may be getting somewhere. For a long time, I've suspected that the Gnostics were an early form of insight psychology. Jung, of course, had high regard for them, and emphasized the importance of getting in touch with our collective unconscious; coming to grips with our "shadow", reconciling the animus and anima in our psyches, etc. That could explain why Joseph Campbell keeps popping up in Greatest I Am's (GIA's posts). I meet regularly with a group of Jungians, and Campbell is a perennial favorite. There is also a strain of thought from Fichte and Schopenhauer to New Age human potential cults which emphasizes our "Higher Consciousness" or "Higher selves", sometimes to the point of self-deification.

Where Jung and the Gnostics seem to differ from GIA is: (1) GIA's emphasis on ego and autonomy; and (2) the intensity of GIA's diatribe against those who believe differently from him. GIA echoes William Earnest Henley's poem Invictus: "I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul." That was written in 1875 after the poet lost a leg and had undergone surgery to save another, and is a manifestation of Victorian "stiff upper lip" Stocism. I'm also reminded of other thinkers of the same era, Nietzsche and Max Stirner, in their celebration of the human ego., or at least that of natural supermen. A sense of personal responsibility is admirable, but when we consider the personal lives of these thinkers, we may have reservations about giving in to a superman complex. Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov may have been right that if there's no God, everything is permitted, but the consequences of that are terrible to contemplate. If we are god, it amounts to the same thing.The conscientious atheists I know recognize an objective moral order beyond their own creation.

Psychology is an important part of religion, but reducing the complex phenomenon to "nothing but' ego is questionable. Some atheists I know were childhood victims of what's been called "toxic faith syndrome"--raised in Christian faiths that emphasize their sinfulness and threatening them with hellfire and damnation for normal sexual thoughts and actions. I think they've done well to escape, and can be excused for bitterness against religion in general. If that's where GIA is coming from, Ihe has my sympathy. But preoccupation with the deficiencies of traditional Christianity gets us stuck in dwelling on the speck in our neighbor's eye, while ignoring the log in our own eye.

 

The ancient Jewish men's morning prayer that thanks God for not creating them as women is still said by some of the more orthodox sects, so I would give credit more to the pagan's view that we adopted of Universalism that give full equality to all souls, male and female and everything in between.

I do not see a no gender view of the older God's, especially the more eastern be life systems. Their God's, like Yahweh, were androgynous, and I think, were created that way so as to represent all people and not just males.

Some sects, yes. Some sects see an androgynous God.

Indeed. Most cannot see a female, known as peacekeepers and makers thanks to child rearing, using genocide or being nearly as immoral as the supernatural based real Gods like Yahweh or Allah.

I agree. They have been corrupted and given up on their Gnosis that would tell them that nothing can be known of the supernatural, IMO.

If the ancient Gnostics had believed in the supernatural, they would not have dubbed Yahweh as a vile demiurge. Fear would have prevented that if they believed in such nonsense. Those modern Gnostics seem to believe what the inquisitors lied about to justify their murders.

Regards
DL

 

Perhaps that is because apotheosis has divine written into it's definition. I usually take that bit out when speaking of my apotheosis.

I think Jung saw our collective consciousness as residing only in our individual minds and not really coalescing anywhere as I have not read where he thought that we shared an (outside of us) collective consciousness, which some statisticians now believe we have thanks to the many random number generating computers scattered all over the world. The God helmet science posits that such a collective resides in earth's solar magnetic shield.

I am not sure as I could not see where I was from within it.

Regards
DL

 

What do those objective moral tenets look like? Can you name a couple?

I ask because I have yet to see one that is not subjective in some way.

Hmm.
Christians idol worship a genocidal son murdering God and think him good.
Gnostic Christians condemn that same God and think him evil.

Who has the splinter in the eye and who has the log?

Regards
DL

 

I don't think that we can reduce religion and spirituality to 'mere psychology' either. These areas interpenetrate one another, or should do. Where either one looses hold of the other they both get diminished. You end up with fundamentalist religion vs a limited mechanistic psychology.

Cults of the ego are dangerous indeed, and really no human being is ultimately the master of their fate. To believe so is simply a form of self delusion. Really most spiritual practices seem to me to aim in one way or another at overcoming the dominance of the ego. Participating in something greater than oneself. The yoga systems outlined in the Bhagavad Gita for example are all aimed at that. So are the practices of many Buddhists and Christian mystics. Gnosticism as it existed in antiquity was evidently another such system. Probably most modern Gnostics have a similar aspiration.

 

Read things like Proverbs ch.8 to see another side of ancient Jewish religion.

'Father' seems to me to be linked to the male gender.

Doesn't really make any differnce to my point. The androgyne forms, are forms. Not the formless Brahman.

The gnostcs also believed in a higher God - the demiurge was seen as a pretender - a fake.

The inquisition and the Gnostics belong to entirely differnt epochs. Moden gnostics tend to believe in scriptures that lay buried througout the time of the inquisition such as those found at Nag Hammadi, which contain much that is supernatural, magical and metphysical.

 

We are not all powerful and cannot go completely alone, but if you are not the general master of your fate, who is?

As to the greater system than ones self, we recognize it and do not just want to participate in it, we seek to lead.

We are all evolving creatures who are driven to be the fittest of our species. Sheeple have given up that prerogative and that is why they have settled for such foul Gods.

Regards
DL

 

A recent innovation and normal, I think, given the misogyny of that day and natural as it was mostly men who argued religions and set the rules. There were a few women but not many. We have used Father for what, since the bronze age. For 20,000 years before the Gods of war, we honored Goddesses mostly.

I can only reiterate that there are no supernatural beliefs in Gnostic Christianity. We have never allowed delusion into our beliefs or been foolish enough to read our myths literally. Sure there are some schools that may have, but that was then and this is now and we have evolved. So should your thinking of what Gnostic Christians are all about.

Regards
DL

 

To lead what? Other people? So they can think just like you and become equally inflated?

You were the one who said you are seeking you 'father complex'.

It's clear after your many repititions that you don't believe in any kind of supernatural. But as you don't seem to be a genuine Gnostic that's irrelavant..

 

The genocidal son murdering God doesn't exist and never has. You're fighting a straw man--a metaphor confused with a literal reality. As for the god you worship (i.e, yourself), he has feet of clay. Judging from your mean-spirited posts, if you're god, you're a false one.

 

Seems our ill-mannered little godling has actually got very little to say that isn't confused and self contradictory.

 

Those who can, do. Those who can't get bitter.
Strange that your selfish gene is not trying to make you the fittest. It must be defective.

Yes, and?

Tell me, who do you venerate more, men or women?

If your ship was sinking, would you put men into the lifeboats or women and children?

Regards
DL