Gnosticism: Esoteric Insight and/or Christian Heresy?

I am a poorly educated man. If I can understand what Gnostic Christianity is all about, it is likely that you and the vast majority can. It is not rocket science. I showed in my post that we hold absolutely no supernatural beliefs and those who carry metaphysics past how I describe it here, thanks to WIKI, then they are going into the supernatural where all that can come of that is speculative nonsense.

"Metaphysics studies questions related to what it is for something to exist and what types of existence there are. Metaphysics seeks to answer, in an abstract and fully general manner, the questions:"

1. What is there?
2. What is it like?

We can study those for the real and natural. Not for the imaginary and non existent unless we know that it is pure speculation and not provable.

We, when speaking of the spiritual heaven, posit a universalist heaven, which would be the ideal if some supernatural God existed and have tied his righteousness to equality, but in the real world, that we recognize as evolving perfection, recognize that we cannot as humans be fully universalist thinkers as we must protect ourselves from criminals and the insane. Our evolving perfect world must have prisons.

Gnostic Scriptures and Fragments: Epiphanes - On Righteousness

We used that bit mostly only when arguing against the Christian myth, which is not a universalist creed, to show them how a real and powerful all knowing God would have to behave. Basically the opposite view as happens often.

Not surprising since we posit a good God and Christianity posits a genocidal and evil God that they somehow see as good. We had to show them the difference than as now. That is partly why they hated us so much. They could not out argue or out think us as we could get ot of the box while they, as literalist of a poorly concocted theology could not.

Regards
DL

 

I use these which I also used in another response above.

Matthew 6:22 The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.

John 14:23 Jesus answered and said unto him, If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.

Romans 8:29 For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.

These following also apply to show when Jesus chastised those who wanted the people to just swallow whatever the Pharisees and other religious leaders said instead of allowing the seeker to be a free thinker, which is what Jesus wanted as that brethren quote shows. Jesus wanted free thinkers who were not bound to tradition and dogma.

Luke 11:52 Woe unto you, lawyers! for ye have taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered.

Mark 7:13 Making the word of God of none effect through your tradition, which ye have delivered: and many such like things do ye.

Regards
DL




Allan Watts explain those quotes in detail.

 

I think your Jesus more of one of the heroes of 1,000 faces that Joseph Campbell wrote of. An archetypal good man hero.

The Roman version that the scribes concocted is not a moral man or God, in my view, and I think Christians agree as they tend to not want to discuss his poor moral tenets with me. I do not blame them as they know they would lose in such a debate.

Regards
DL

 

I also hate knowledge sometimes. I have a poor memory and tend to take the good out of what I read and forget where the information came from.

Let me hurt your head by saying that you might be a serpent worshiper as, if my poor memory serves, the Irish had their whole region set up for serpent worship. Don't tell the Christians. They will brand you a Satanist.

Regards
DL

 

So you're saying the Gnosoticism of yesteryear is not the modern Gnosticism you're talking about? No Unknown God, Monad, Aeons, Archons, Sophia? Glad you cleared that up. Your myths are to be interpreted metaphorically. Fancy that. Will you also accept that the same thing has happened on the traditional Christian side. I agree that a majority of Christians worldwide aren't there yet, but truth isn't a numbers game. Mainline Protestant churches are not your great great grandfather's churches, and within them are progressive groups who are quite freethinking in their approaches and dedicated to the pursuit of social justice.

Your video excerpt is interesting in that Dr. Jed Hill (played by Alex Baldwin) in the movie Malice is regarded as giving a megalomaniac rant. Not sure what it has to do with Gnosticism, but in the movie, the point was he's a narcissistic asshole who literally thinks he's god and that such surgeons with a God complex aren't good for their patients or the world at large. What is your point in sharing that in a dicussion of Gnosticism?

 

If you consider what I put this morning so far and have yet to get back, ------



Regards
DL

 

Ah, yes. When you say God, you mean yourselves. Isn't that just like narcissistic Dr. Jed Hill in your Alex Baldwin video excerpt from Malice? What exactly does that get us, apart from a swelled head and an off-putting manner? Taken literally, Gnosticism, by that account, has morphed into a pretentious version of Max Stirner's Egoism, in which each of us becomes a law unto himself/herself. That attitude helped to undo classical Gnosticism and does not seem like what we need in a world where unbridled egoism seems to be on the rise and is making governance difficult. What are Gnostic ethics then?

 

Hi, and thanks again for the O.P.

What is God?

God, as I showed in that link, was defined by the intelligentsia as the best rules and laws they could envisage either for the real world or an imaginary one so as to do the possible and set the impossible aside at that given point in time.

Given that all the biblical characters are fiction, that gave us leave to also create a bunch of fictional characters to put against Yahweh.

In fiction, you can put as many God above God as you like and we just did that and that matrix or fractal thinking is why so many movies have been dubbed Gnostic thinking type of movies. Think fractals and how one set gives birth to another. The ancient intelligentsia recognized that and that is why they so vehemently were anti supernatural thinking mode.

No I will not accept that literalism is dead in Christianity given that 70 odd % of Christians claim a real Satan and close to 100% of Christians believe in a literal Jesus. Those are U. S. stats and I do not know how they differ from the more intelligent Christians abroad.

If the progressive Christians are pursuing social justice, they should get out of their religion and stop associating themselves with a creed that is far from social thinking as the parent religion is still preaching homophobia and misogyny.

Regards
DL

 

It is not narcissistic to say that we are masters of our own mental ships. We are perpetual seekers and do not have inflated egos.

We leave that spot open to egotistical idol worshipers who think they have a direct link to some supernatural fictional God.

"Whoever imagines himself a favorite with God,
holds other people in contempt.
Whenever a man believes that he has the exact truth from God,
there is in that man no spirit of compromise.
He has not the modesty born of the imperfections of human nature;
he has the arrogance of theological certainty and the tyranny born of ignorant assurance.
Believing himself to be the slave of God,
he imitates his master,
and of all tyrants,
the worst is a slave in power."
--Robert Ingersoll

Regards
DL

 

A rejection of all thinks supernatural is the beginning of wisdom. Not the fear of God that Christians spout.

Do not fear who you are. You are your own God and master of your own ship. Step up proudly.

Regards
DL

 

The notion that a perfect creator would screw up so badly that he would have to condemn all of his work is too ludicrous to even contemplate.

I have no idea how even the most gullible mind could think so poorly as to fall to such a lie. The lie is all about false guilt so as to loosen the purse string of the fools who believe it.



Regards
DL

 

I will let you catch up to post # 34 at least and if your question is not answered to your satisfaction, please put it.

Regards
DL

 

That may be true. It's far different from classical Gnosticism, which is okay, as far as we're clear about it.

 

Good Ol' Bshop Spong. Not a Gnostic, but a Progressive Christian like me. Yes, I agree with much, if not all, of what he says. Hell is a bad attitude.

 

The Gnostics of late antiquity seem to have been a very long way away from rejecting the 'supernatural'.

 

Many Progressive Chirstians form progressive churches that are accepting and inclusive, as Jesus intended. Many others, like me and Bishop Spong, stay in mainline churches in hopes of reforming them from within, as did the Valentinian Gnostics of yore. I won't leave, because it seems to me we're the true Christians, while some of the others strike me as the true Pharisees. They should get out and form the Pharisee church. I agree with the late Marcus Borg, another Progressive Christian, who argued that the whole point of Jesus was to preach a gospel of inclusion, which went against the purity movement in Judaism and got him crucified.

 

Master of your own ship until you catch a cold or some other misfortune outside you control overtakes you.

 

The dude in the video is Reza Aslan, professor of--not religion, but creative writing, which comes through in his books. He started out a nominal Shiite Muslim, became an evangelical Christian, then an atheist, and currently is a Sufi Muslim--not a Gnostic but close enough. For a fuller exposition of his ideas about God, see his book God: A Human History. In the You Tube video here, he tells us that religion seems to be a universal phenomenon, and that it doesn't seem to serve a known adaptive function but might be the by-product of one, or just an innate human characteristic.

Actually, I think it's multi-functional for individuals and societies, which could be a strength and a weakness. Some investigators thought it was an expression of an innate sense of awe of the sacred, which Rudolph Otto called the mysterium tremendum et facinas (profound and fascinating mystery). It consists of a sense of the holy, the sacred, the numinous (sublime spirituality), the transcenent, the uncanny--a special emotion or feeling of overpowering awe and mystery. The emotion can be stirred by the presence of unusual natural phenomena (e.g., the Grand Canyon, storms, sunsets, etc.) or man made wonders like temples and cathedrals, or possibly great works of music and art. Mercia Eliade expanded on this, stressing the importance of holy spaces called hierophanies where the numinous supersedes the profane (the routine reality of everyday life). Cognitive psychologists stress the function of cognitive mapping, or organizing perceptions to make sense of our environment. Humans have a tendency to see patterns ("patternicity") even when none are there, e.g., seeing faces in clouds. This seems to be a property of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which in excess can lead to hallucinations. Also at work is "agenticity"-a tendency to perceive agency even when there may be none. This "better safe than sorry" instinct led our ancestors to perceive an ambiguous object which could be a log or an alligator as the latter. At another level of psychological functioning is ego defense, or the mechanisms governed by our unconscious needs and "existential anxieties" that Freud and Jung brought out in their depth psychology. Freud saw religion as an obsessional neurosis rooted in wish fulfillment, while Jung respected it as a reservoir of archetypes and symbols from the collective unconscious. Dreams must have been a perplexing phenomena for prehistoric and ancient peoples, and it is understandable that visits from long-deceased loved ones and their own travels to strange realms while asleep would give them the idea of a spirit world. Behavioral conditioning and social learning also played a role. Humans get much of their knowledge early on from parents and trusted friends and elders, so once established in a culture, the beliefs are transmitted naturally from one generation to another. But religious belief has never been an individual phenomenon. Durkheim saw it as a system for binding individuals to their society through common symbols, totems and rituals, and as a means of social control. Others emphasized the role of religion in legitimating chiefs, kings, shamans and priests. In his book Breaking the Spell, atheist Daniel Dennett lays this out and then wonders why, being told all this, people still cling to religion. I think he answered his own question.

The use of Jesus as an archetype isn't peculiar to Gnosticism. Progressive Christians tend to do the same thing. As the late Albert Schweitzer used to say, the historical Jesus was "too historical" --i.e., he was a man of this times, with the beliefs, values and concerns of a first century Galilean. But from His life and teachings, we can glean universal ideals that serve as an inspiration for us in the twenty-first century. He is still the Christ, the Logos and my personal Savior.That's why questions like "don't you know Jesus believed in hell and opposed divorce?" tend to be beside the point. They strike me as similar to questions about others of my heroes: Don't you know the Buddha abandoned his wife and son? Don't you know the Prophet Muhammad married a nine year old? Don't you know Jefferson had slaves and had sex with one of them? Don't you know Wagner was a deadbeat, adulterer and virulent Anti-Semite? Don't you know that Gandhi was accused of beating his wife? Yes, but I won't let that obscure their greatness, which is eternal. God is, among other things, the summation of human idealism. (John Dewey)

 

Although the Catholic Church sought to eliminate the Gnostics after the time of Constantine, and made a pretty thorough job of it, nonetheless within the Christian religion have always been a few mystics - people who claimed that they had gone beyond faith and directly experienced God. Julian of Norwich, Miester Eckhart, St. Catherine of Sienna, Theresa of Avila, John of the Cross and many more. I think it's noteworthy that mainly, Christian mystics have come out of either the Catholic or Orthodox traditions, mostly either monks or nuns - protestantism seems to be short on mytstics, perhaps because the reformation was the start of a movement towards a much more secular view of the world and of Christianity.
Of course there were probably uncounted numbers of others who had Christian mystical experiences over the centuries, and even up to the present, but history doesn't record that.

I'd recommend Evelyn Underhill's book 'Mysticism' (written around 100 years ago, but still excellent and widely available) as a very good overview and introduction to the topic of Christian mysticism if you are interested.

It seems to me that if there is any future for gnosticism, which is by no means certain, it would probably be in terms of Christian churches moving more towards an experiential type of spirituality. Whether they can or will do so only time will tell.

 

This is all so depressing to me. The word spirituality is depressing. It doesn't really mean anything. I can't stand this introverted, self-hating striving for inner purity. When you set something up to be a problem - guilt, temptation, carnal sin - it becomes a problem that you can't surmount, because you don't see them as your friend and helper in life. None of these transgressions are a problem. When you see they are not a problem you leave them and walk away. Once you accept your natural desires and remove the guilt and very concept of sin you are able to accept humanity, with it's bodily fluids, shit, piss, menstrual cycles and imperfections. And I say this as someone with Catholic leanings. Forgive me for speaking my mind, but this is how I feel right now.