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Breadpilled on scored.co
15 days ago1 point(+0/-0/+1Score on mirror)1 child
There's a solid case to be made for some of classical gnosticism's ontology. A lot of the modern spins on it are a post-enlightenment butchery not unlike what's happened with Christian or even "Pagan" cults waving fag flags around. Gnosticism is distinct in that it has virtually *never* been a religion, but a school of spiritual philosophical thought, a la Platonism, Dualism, etc.
It's not so much that the material *doesn't matter,* and that heaven is a featureless spirit realm, but that the material realm *we inhabit* is *corrupt*—the fruit of an evil seed (demiurge)—and that heaven is something utterly *other* from what we see before us.
Even Christians believe this in function—they just dress it up differently. They call the world "fallen," and speak of a "new earth." Gnosticism's pitch just strips away the hedging.
No "the world is God's good creation, but he let it reshape itself into something evil at the genome level, and lets Satan rule it to perpetuate that evil, but he's gonna take it back eventually and remake it, and it's going to be completely unrecognizable at the root even though it's technically the same base material..."
Instead—"This material realm is the evil creation created by an evil god, the *capital G* Good God, who operates by means of the spirit, seeks to rescue you from it and take you somewhere better."
I've always found that immensely more plausible, and it freely bypasses many of the patristic thornbushes that Christianity remains tangled up in to this day.
It's not so much that the material *doesn't matter,* and that heaven is a featureless spirit realm, but that the material realm *we inhabit* is *corrupt*—the fruit of an evil seed (demiurge)—and that heaven is something utterly *other* from what we see before us.
Even Christians believe this in function—they just dress it up differently. They call the world "fallen," and speak of a "new earth." Gnosticism's pitch just strips away the hedging.
No "the world is God's good creation, but he let it reshape itself into something evil at the genome level, and lets Satan rule it to perpetuate that evil, but he's gonna take it back eventually and remake it, and it's going to be completely unrecognizable at the root even though it's technically the same base material..."
Instead—"This material realm is the evil creation created by an evil god, the *capital G* Good God, who operates by means of the spirit, seeks to rescue you from it and take you somewhere better."
I've always found that immensely more plausible, and it freely bypasses many of the patristic thornbushes that Christianity remains tangled up in to this day.