Gnosticism.

[Greatest_I_am]

@MagsJ

@Greatest I am

@MagsJ

Hi DL… I am a bit blinkered, as I don’t understand what it is that others ask or seek, because I do not understand the true intrinsic meaning or nature, of their words.

I have met kind people, but not necessarily genuine people… is that what you mean?

What I mean is that Jesus was teaching us how to act in our natural state, and was not referring to anything in the supernatural. Christians do not want to admit that as their religion is fantasy and supernaturally based.

These lines bolster that view.

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.

Allan Watts explain those quotes in detail.
youtube.com/watch?v=alRNbes … r_embedded

Regards
DL

Hey DL! Thanks for the clarification.

“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.”

Sounds like a visual positive-affirmation, to me… a visualisation, to guide a person to a positive mental and ultimately a physical place. Do agnostics do this through sheer will, or by other means?
_
“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.”

Sounds like making friends, not enemies, so doing away with feudalism and tribal warfare. Do Gnostics not agree with that, as a better way to live/to exist?
_
“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.”

Ok, I have no idea what that means, but I don’t know the full context it was said in… I’ll look it up, and respond on it then.

It is esoteric. You have to look within, not without.

That last means Yahweh gives up power to judge to the son at his right hand. A good thing if they had not made Jesus as genocidal as dad.

That guy, if you can recognize him is you. You end in claiming your sovereignty. In DNA terms, you affirm your fitness. In spiritual terms, you have evolved and graduated.

Regards
DL

[Greatest_I_am]

@Zero_Sum

This is suppose to be a thread about Gnosticism, not different faces of the Demiurge where people recite things about a pathetic weak dead crucified Jew. Thanks in advance.

Ancient Romans should of burned his dead body and scattered his ashes to the four winds, their only mistake.

Would of been extremely difficult to have a resurrection cult if all that was left of his remains were cremated.

In fantasies, the icon maters not.

What question on Gnosticism do you have in mind?

Regards
DL

[Greatest_I_am]

@Zero_Sum

[b]Pagan interpretation: Jesus, Allah, and Yahweh are indeed all the same singular figure that is Yaldabaoth[Demiurge].

Jesus is the son of Yaldabaoth, whoopty fucking du. The old testament is shit and so is the new one.[/b]

Christian Gnostics: “But we worship the bastard son, not the father!”

The demiurge (Greek demiurgos,[1] “craftsman”[2]) is the being who created the world in Gnosticism. The Gnostics identified him with the god of the Old Testament. The Gnostic scriptures portray him as ignorant, malicious, and utterly inferior to the true God who sent Christ to earth to save mankind from the demiurge’s evil world.

The demiurge is given many names in the Gnostic scriptures, but the three most common ones are Yaldabaoth (also spelled “Ialdabaoth”), Samael, and Saklas. “Saklas” comes from the Aramaic word for “fool,” and “Samael” is Aramaic for “Blind God” or “God of the Blind.”[3] The meaning of “Yaldabaoth” is uncertain. The Gnostic text On the Origin of the World fancifully translates it as “Youth, move over there,” but no word or string of words that sounds like “Yaldabaoth” meant that in any ancient Mediterranean language.[4] “Yaldabaoth” is somewhat close to “child of chaos” in Aramaic, but that’s still a stretch,[5] as is the intuitively plausible suggestion that it could be a condensed form of “Yahweh, Lord of Sabbaths.”[6]

In the Gnostic creation myth, Heaven – which the Gnostics called the “Pleroma,” “Fullness” – was all that existed until a divine entity named Sophia tried to conceive on her own, without the involvement of her heavenly partner or the consent of God. Sophia gave birth to a son that was the product of the rebellious and profane desire that had arisen within her.

This son of hers was the demiurge. The Gnostic text Reality of the Archons describes “him” as an androgynous being, an “arrogant beast” that resembled an aborted fetus in both appearance and character.[7] The Secret Book of John adds that he had the body of a snake and the head of a lion, with eyes like lightning bolts.[8] (In ancient Greek philosophy, the lion was frequently a symbol of irrational passions. The Gnostics were steeped in the Greek philosophical tradition, so their description of the demiurge as having a lion’s head was probably intended to show that he was a being who couldn’t or wouldn’t control his base urges.[9] That certainly fits the demiurge’s personality as described in their texts.)

When Sophia saw the horrifying, twisted being that had come from her, she was deeply ashamed and afraid. She disowned him and cast him out of Heaven.

From his lonely position where his madness and conceit could go unchecked, the demiurge gave birth to the archons (“rulers”[10]), beings who were like him and could help him administer the material world. He then created the material world, which, like all creations, was a reflection of the personality of its creator.

The demiurge then created Adam and Eve and imprisoned divine sparks from Heaven within them. He told them that he was the only god and issued the Ten Commandments, even though he himself broke each and every one of those commandments. For example, he lied when he claimed to be the only god and that Adam and Eve would die if they ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil; he insulted his mother and father by refusing to acknowledge their existence; he made a graven image of the divine when he modeled the material world on his corrupt and ignorant misunderstanding of Heaven; and he committed adultery by attempting to rape Eve.[11]

Where the Idea of the Gnostic Demiurge Came From

How could the Gnostics have possibly come up with the idea that such a being created the earth? It seems quite incongruous with Christianity as we understand it today. But in the time when Gnosticism arose (the late first or early second century AD), that wasn’t really the case. To be sure, Jews, Roman pagans, and the Gnostics’ fellow Christians found the Gnostic idea of an evil creator to be shocking and blasphemous. But when we consider the intellectual and spiritual environment within which Gnosticism arose – one that was dominated by Plato’s long shadow, and where Christians were still trying to decide on the basics of their new religion and separate it from Judaism – the Gnostic conception of the demiurge makes a lot more sense.

The word “demiurge” comes from Plato, although Plato’s demiurge was far from evil. For Plato and other pagan Greek and Roman philosophers who followed him, the material world was the creation of a divine “craftsman” who made the world the best reflection of the perfect spiritual world of the Forms that was possible given the constraints of matter.[12]

In Judaism, it was an established tradition to split off particular faculties of God from God himself and credit those lesser divine beings, such as Wisdom, with having assisted God in the creation of the world, as in the eighth chapter of Proverbs and the twenty-fourth chapter of Sirach. Christians inherited and extended this tradition, such as when the first chapter of the Gospel of John identifies Christ with God’s Word/Logos and gives him an indispensable role in creation.[13]

So the Gnostics’ attribution of the act of creation to someone other than the ultimate God was hardly radical by the standards of the Christianity and Judaism of their time – indeed, it was downright conventional. But the Gnostics’ influences all portrayed these divine helpers as benevolent and their work as in harmony with the wishes of the perfectly good ultimate God. How did the Gnostics get the idea that the demiurge was instead malevolent?

Strange as it may at first seem, this, too, was probably a good-faith interpretation of Christian scriptures that were already widespread, popular, and authoritative in the Gnostics’ time. After all, the Gospel of Luke (4:6) and the Gospel of Matthew (4:8) assume that Satan is the ruler of the world when Satan offers Jesus the world in exchange for his worship. Likewise, the Gospel of John mentions an evil “ruler (archon) of this world” in no less than three places (12:31, 14:30, and 16:11). Luke (10:18) and John (12:31) both speak of Satan or a Satan-like entity ruling the earth from the sky and being vanquished by Jesus’s ministry.[14] 1 John 5:19 is even more blunt: “We know that we are God’s children, and that the whole world lies under the power of the evil one.”[15]

The Christians of the first and second centuries, including the Gnostics, were tasked with the monumental project of figuring out what to do with the “Old Testament” that they were supplanting with their own “New Testament.” In the words of Simone Pétrement, they were attempting “to limit the value of the Old Testament within a religion that nevertheless preserves it.”[16]

Early Christians were highly critical of many of the particulars of Judaism, asserting that Christ had come to correct what the Jews had gotten wrong. Consider the Apostle Paul’s remarks to Peter on the Mosaic Law, the centerpiece of Judaism, in Galatians 2:11-21:

We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners; yet we know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ. … I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not nullify the grace of God; for if justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing.[17]

The Gnostics took all of these pieces and combined them. If the world had been created by a lesser being rather than the ultimate God, and if the world was currently ruled by a demonic being, and if Christ had come to correct the flaws of Judaism, why not posit that the Jewish creator god was the demonic being who ruled the world – that Christ came as an emissary from the ultimate God to save mankind from the creator?

Note, by the way, that the Gnostics could arrive at this position even while upholding the sanctity of the Jewish scriptures: everything those books said was accurate, but their authors had been ignorant of the true meaning of what they had written about.[18]

Such a view also had the effect of enabling the Gnostics to make sense of several passages in the Old Testament that had long troubled Christians and even Jews. “The god of Genesis,” notes David Brakke,

walks in an earthly garden and must ask where Adam is (Genesis 3:8-9); he concludes that his creation of humanity and animals was a mistake and decides to destroy all people, except for a single family and a few beasts (6:5-22); and he later annihilates entire cities by raining sulfur and fire down upon them (19:24-25).[19]

The Gnostics took Genesis at its word and concluded that this god was simply malicious, hot-tempered, stupid, and inept.

gnosticismexplained.org/the-gnostic-demiurge/

Thanks for this.

You are correct in that Gnostic Christians understand both the literalist Jewish and Christian reading of myths.

Generally, as that is all that can be said of such a fractured religion.

We are not literal readers of myths and hold no supernatural beliefs.

Nature is all that is needed to explain reality. In fact, Mother Nature makes a fool of Yahweh as she creates for the best possible end while Yahweh does not. Yahweh is genocidal while Mother Nature is not.

As a side note, please do not insult Gnostic Christians by saying we worship anything.

We are perpetual seekers and not idolaters like the mainstream religions.

Regards
DL

[Mr_J]

@Greatest I am

In fantasies, the icon maters not.

What question on Gnosticism do you have in mind?

Regards
DL

Sure, that’s why you call yourself a Christian, a follower of Christ.

The Gnosticism I have in mind is a natural reversion back to paganism and the old gods of this earth, to this I’ve been quite clear.

Where nature was celebrated over the materialism of mankind and where humanity’s natural behavior was understood instead of being regulated, forbidden, taboo, or chastised.

[Mr_J]

@Artimas

Just because people don’t understand it doesn’t mean it is the religions fault itself. People twisted in with their own perceptions and edit it. The very basic idea was to follow wisdom and expanding consciousness. Not to be interpreted literally.

Christians, when they weren’t killing pagans or nonbelievers they often enough have killed each other over a dead Jewish God long dead. How exactly can one misinterpret Christianity especially if one is a biblical literalist? The words or voice of God are quite clear, are they not?

Aren’t you suppose to be a Satanist? Another group of imbeciles that don’t understand the history or meaning behind Saturnus. Truly a tragedy and a comedy.

[Mr_J]

@Greatest I am

Thanks for this.

You are correct in that Gnostic Christians understand both the literalist Jewish and Christian reading of myths.

Generally, as that is all that can be said of such a fractured religion.

We are not literal readers of myths and hold no supernatural beliefs.

Nature is all that is needed to explain reality. In fact, Mother Nature makes a fool of Yahweh as she creates for the best possible end while Yahweh does not. Yahweh is genocidal while Mother Nature is not.

As a side note, please do not insult Gnostic Christians by saying we worship anything.

We are perpetual seekers and not idolaters like the mainstream religions.

Regards
DL

It’s clear you worship Christ and that is all I need to know of your fraud.

Nature is all that is needed to explain reality. In fact, Mother Nature makes a fool of Yahweh as she creates for the best possible end while Yahweh does not. Yahweh is genocidal while Mother Nature is not.

Don’t invoke mother nature with your Semitic demon of a God, it insults her and your religion has raped this earth that brings you shame in mentioning her at all. On a side note, mother earth while being female is nothing without the male aspect, but that is a different conversation altogether. [The earth being both male and female having both aspects.]

[MagsJ (..a chic geek)]

@Greatest I am

@MagsJ

Hey DL! Thanks for the clarification.

“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.”

Sounds like a visual positive-affirmation, to me… a visualisation, to guide a person to a positive mental and ultimately a physical place. Do agnostics do this through sheer will, or by other means?
_
“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.”

Sounds like making friends, not enemies, so doing away with feudalism and tribal warfare. Do Gnostics not agree with that, as a better way to live/to exist?
_
“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.”

Ok, I have no idea what that means, but I don’t know the full context it was said in… I’ll look it up, and respond on it then.

It is esoteric. You have to look within, not without.

I looked within, then started to want to look without, and so I did… as it was all about what everything meant to us, in relation to all else and our place in it.

That last means Yahweh gives up power to judge to the son at his right hand. A good thing if they had not made Jesus as genocidal as dad.

That guy, if you can recognize him is you. You end in claiming your sovereignty. In DNA terms, you affirm your fitness. In spiritual terms, you have evolved and graduated.

Well I nearly failed in that endeavour, because I told our Deacon that I didn’t think god existed I then retracted my claim, so that I could sit on the right hand side of Our Father in Heaven. After which, the Confirmed were free to choose their path and wider sect, of which I chose spirituality over religiosity, which was kindly accepted by all.

It’s definitely an evolution, and a continual moving-forward… as those that wear laurels don’t rest on em…

[Artimas]

@Zero_Sum

@Artimas

Just because people don’t understand it doesn’t mean it is the religions fault itself. People twisted in with their own perceptions and edit it. The very basic idea was to follow wisdom and expanding consciousness. Not to be interpreted literally.

Christians, when they weren’t killing pagans or nonbelievers they often enough have killed each other over a dead Jewish God long dead. How exactly can one misinterpret Christianity especially if one is a biblical literalist? The words or voice of God are quite clear, are they not?

Aren’t you suppose to be a Satanist? Another group of imbeciles that don’t understand the history or meaning behind Saturnus. Truly a tragedy and a comedy.

Me? A satanist! Hahaha, I’ve never been a satanist. What’s that have to do with anything? That’s ad hominem actually, doesn’t that mean you’ve lost?

Pagan gods, all of the pagan gods are simply man externalizing their own inner psyche, which adds up to the monotheistic description of the Christian god (when spiritual people caught on to the fact that the deity is wisdom itself and a transcendental function of consciousness and reality), people who act off of a misunderstanding of the Bible and religions, does not mean the original intent of the religion or Bible is based on their act.

[Mr_J]

@Artimas

satanist! Hahaha, I’ve never been a satanist. What’s that have to do with anything? That’s ad hominem actually, doesn’t that mean you’ve lost?

Pagan gods, all of the pagan gods are simply man externalizing their own inner psyche, which adds up to the monotheistic description of the Christian god (when spiritual people caught on to the fact that the deity is wisdom itself and a transcendental function of consciousness and reality), people who act off of a misunderstanding of the Bible and religions, does not mean the original intent of the religion or Bible is based on their act.

Dude, you’re sporting a Baphomet in your avatar with an inverted pentagram. Yeah, I’m not a monotheist so…

[Artimas]

@Zero_Sum

@Artimas

satanist! Hahaha, I’ve never been a satanist. What’s that have to do with anything? That’s ad hominem actually, doesn’t that mean you’ve lost?

Pagan gods, all of the pagan gods are simply man externalizing their own inner psyche, which adds up to the monotheistic description of the Christian god (when spiritual people caught on to the fact that the deity is wisdom itself and a transcendental function of consciousness and reality), people who act off of a misunderstanding of the Bible and religions, does not mean the original intent of the religion or Bible is based on their act.

Dude, you’re sporting a Baphomet in your avatar with an inverted pentagram. Yeah, I’m not a monotheist so…

Yes, baphomet is not Satan. Satan is just metaphor for man’s ignorance, instinct, animal side. If not to do with Saturn as Lucifer is to Venus. Baphomet is a deity and symbol of duality/balance. It is modern Thoth, since it is pan, hermes’(Thoth) son. If you look up satanism and their church, they changed the symbol to having no breasts, baphomet has breasts to depict feminine as well as phallus to depict masculine. To remove one is to upset the symbols nature and representation of duality, which means it would no longer be Baphomet. I also have a meaning for the inverted pentagram. The points to the side of it represent elements, the top or bottom point depicts spirit, when flipped and point is down, spirit is at the bottom, it represents man’s consciousness/spirit evolving through the use of the elements, a symbiotic relationship, normal pentagram the spirit is on top, through its use of the elements it triumphs over and rules elements now, in reality we have survived and use them constantly.