This I can wrap my mind around. As God said to Moses before the burning bush: "I Am who I Am…I will finish that with …Becoming.
lol I might have said the same thing to you.
I was actually hoping for something different, fresher, something more brought up-to-date, you know, to these modern times.
In other words, what some Christians might call evil where Gnostic Christians would not in order to get the mindset of a GC. We all have a different sense at times of what immorality is, what evil is, and things are not so black and white. You are a dualist. This is fine but things have more colors and hues to them then simply being black/white/gray.
Since none of that is real anyway, why not try to depict a God on the opposite side of that coin.
I never call evil good. Murder is not good, Rape is not good, pedophilia is not good, beating one’s wife or children is not good, dropping bombs on innocents is not good. Greed while others go hungry and suffer for that greed is not good, homelessness is not good. Do you want me to go on or you can.
True. Actions which come about because of this kind of ignorance can be evil actions. They are not so much about being a christian or not though Christians and those striving to be good ought to have compassion and empathy. They are about growing up in ignorance, taking everything in the bible as literal instead of learning to think for one’s self. They are about fear and mis-understanding.
You are putting things in the wrong way. I am not so sure that you would not, could not, find a gnostic christian somewhere who is not homophobic, misogynistic or both.
Do you see anything at all evil in the way Richard Dawkins approached his idea of the God of the Old Testament? Can there be any such thing as a benign atheist or a benign agnostic?
What about you and your approach? Is it working for you. I read your post where you have been kicked out of Catholic and Christian forums. How you can still teach, point real things out and at the same time not burst people’s bubbles, so to speak?
Your first is correct and Christianity has institutionalized homophobia and misogyny which Christians accept unthinkingly as gospel.
You seem to agree that they are calling those evil good.
As to Gnostic Christians being homophobic and misogynous, impossible.
We are universalists in our spiritual and secular thinking, to a lesser degree and cannot see souls as unequal as we have tied equality to righteousness.
This link has to be modernized but gives our older thinking.
As to Dawkins.
He has the right moral view of the genocidal prick of a god, while I think he is only analysing the myth as literally as the Christian right without seeing the moral value of it, if, like Gnostic Christians, he would reverse the Christian take, which is more the way Jews see their myth.
I see him as a naturalist and agree with him from that POV.
The Devil wrote the Bible".–MH
I never said I agreed with him. For me the Bible is a fat udder for spiritual infants. It can nourish if read carefully.
lol I have never heard that before, Ierrellus. It was funny and yet a bit creepy in its bestiality-like image.
They need not be spiritual infants who are nourished by the bible.
Have you forgotten that a prepositional phrase ought not to begin a sentence, Ierrellus, at least not without a comma?
After listening to the Bible videos by Jordan Peterson, I believe that psychologically there is a lot in the Bible, but we have forgotten how to read it. Prior to the renaissance, people used stories to explain things for which they had no vocabulary.
Do you see the individual? Do you see the part or always just what you consider to be the whole?
I have no idea what the statistics would be insofar as the percentage of christians/catholics who would believe homophobia and misogyny to be acceptable and good BUT not all of them would believe in that way. Sometimes it is a question of upbringing and not LEARNING TO THINK FOR ONE’S SELF. The main thing that these biased people are guilty of is not questioning what the bible says. It is called Ignorance.
Look above. Perhaps you are correct insofar as some go but my main point is that they have no idea what they are even saying when they go along with these beliefs. As I said in the post above…
They are about growing up in ignorance, taking everything in the bible as literal instead of learning to think for one’s self. They are about fear and mis-understanding.
So what you seem to be saying, as I read it, is that Gnostic Christians are kind of infallible and can have no biases, no wrongful thinking. How deep do you think the psyche or core of a human being goes anyway?
Okay, I can understand that albeit I still do not agree with his approach. I also agree with and share his thoughts given in the below hyperlink. They shed a didn’t kind of light on him. I will admit that I do not know a lot about him.
My last post was based on Greatest Iam’s admission of having a Bible in his home. I wrote sentences that might evoke his response. I did not say that the Bible is never spiritually nourishing. Bob is right. One’s attitude about the book depends on how it is read. It can offer ideas of brotherly (and sisterly) love or excuses for violence and hatred. I just wanted to see if GIA throws out the baby with the bath water.
From reading Elaine Pagels and Hans Jonas on Christian Gnosticism I came to the understanding that it is just another mythology. I’m not saying the myths are bad or even in error. Choosing to believe in one or the other is a personal choice. Fundamentalist Christianity is now being challenged by many thoughtful progressives. Dawkins’, et.al, criticisms of it are like the beating of a dead horse.
I think you’re preaching to a crowd that is dwindling. I’ve been following atheist arguments for over 20 years and as is also true of theist arguments, the atheist ones have certain recurring themes…like appealing in their arguments to the lowest common denominator in (most of the time) Christianity, the literalists. There are still a reasonable number of them around but they’re thinning out; your target audience is shrinking. There is an underlying semantical system system in the Bible which is both rational (dictionary type, not philosophical) and allegorical by which it can be demonstrated that the hell passages are metaphors for internal [spiritual] cleansing, most likely accomplished in time. The promotion of any allegorical system of interpretation has traditionally been considered a treading ground of religious liberalism, but this allegorical system–while it certainly rocks the literalist boat (universal salvation is a prime tenet)–nonetheless not only supports most traditional doctrines, it offers even stronger evidence of the supernatural orchestration of the Bible than literalism can claim, and I find those claims reasonably impressive.
Point: interpreting the Bible differently than the traditional literalist way, if that interpretation is able to account for entire themes (like the hell passages for instance) is not “ignoring half the bible”. The Cor. 15 passage noted is not cherry picking when hell as a “refining” process has been factored in.
I can’t seem to wrap my mind around the myth that some demiurge created the World. The ethics of Gnostic Christianity sound reasonable and good. Why obscure that fact with an alternative creation mythology?
And yet on the other side of the issue there are those who find notion of a designer perfectly reasonable. What I am most interested in is what account can be given for the motives that form the beliefs on each side–more accurately, what are the parameters by which those motives come into being? But am leaving the topic of the op so I’ll defer the explanation for another thread another time.
An appropriate post. Whose motives would you like to hear about? The believers’ or what is believed to be the Gods’? Why can’t the designer be natural, not supernatural? Is a motive of the creator to chastise that which was created?
