Greatest I am wrote:Marcion disagreed with the orthodoxy and that might be enough to have me see him as a Gnostic as it shows he is a free thinker. Gnostic Christianity has evolved over time and it would be best to discuss his position on things and compare them to modern Gnostic Christian thinking though as Christianity won the god wars and muddied the waters in terms of what we actually believed. Like the lies that we do not venerate matter and think the world corrupted. Gnosticism, defined in short form, is a creed of esoteric ecumenists and naturalists who recognize that all gods are man made and we just openly admit it and if we are all to make up our own gods then why not take the label of god, which we do, by naming god I am and actually meaning ourselves. Knowledge and honesty is paramount to us and that is what frustrates some as we will only speak to what we know or can be known, which excludes anything supernatural.
Scholars disagree about whether or not Marcion was a Gnostic. Wiki says the following:
Marcion is sometimes described as a Gnostic philosopher.
In some essential respects, Marcion proposed ideas which would have aligned well with Gnostic thought.
Like the Gnostics, he argued that Jesus was essentially a divine spirit appearing to human beings in the shape of a human form, and not someone in a true physical body.
However, Marcionism conceptualizes God in a way which cannot be reconciled with broader Gnostic thought.
For Gnostics, some human beings are born with a small piece of God's soul lodged within his/her spirit (akin to the notion of a Divine Spark).
God is thus intimately connected to and part of his creation.
Salvation lies in turning away from the physical world (which Gnostics regard as an illusion) and embracing the godlike qualities within yourself.
Marcion, by contrast, held that the Heavenly Father (the father of Jesus Christ) of Marcionism was an utterly alien god; he had no part in making the world, nor any connection with it.
Greatest I am wrote:If Jesus had unconditional love for all, he sure did not show it to the merchants who had the temples permission to be where they were when Jesus chased them away from the temple.
I already stated that Jesus seems to contradict the sermon on the mount elsewhere in the texts. Your example may be an instance of that.
Greatest I am wrote:Unconditional love would be epitome of love. Love of the highest form. I think. Ask those mothers if their love would grow for their children if their children had not been axe murderers or otherwise unworthy. If they say yes, which I think they would, then they have conditions to the degree of love they have even for their children. That fact negates unconditional love of the highest degree.
To be unconditional, is to impose no conditions, qualifications, stipulations. To be of the highest form might be something else. I don't see why love couldn't be granted unconditionally and yet still have the capacity to greater or lesser. So, imagine a woman who loves her abusive husband but realizes that if she stayed with him he would kill her. So she leaves him but still has feelings of love for him. Such love as she has for him is unconditional love. Is it the highest love? I don't know. How does one determine that?