Jesus is the way and that way is the Gnostic Christian way.

Post Reply New Topic

The only problem I have with gnosticism is its more severe ascetic practices. But, I enjoy its philosophic practices combined with its less harmful practices.

It's interesting how the Buddha went through an extremely ascetic period before he found "enlightenment."

Previous to his time in the forest, the Buddha was some kind of spoiled young prince.

An ascetic minded person will not see his actions as harmful but in Gnostic Christianity, I do not recall reading of ascetic groups because we males generally enjoy the company of women more than the usual religion. We see all people as equal, even gays and women, and thus ascetic behaviors do not gain a man separation from the whole or closer to God as the sparks of God are within people and the more people around ones self, the more access one has to God.

Regards
DL

That is what we are told.

Many sages who use meditation will isolate themselves. It is a good way to help one focus but is not necessary for enlightenment. All that takes is Gnosis and desire and I think that that desire is what initiates the process of enlightenment and to me that means that one must challenge himself by finding an adversary in either the religious or political arenas. At least I think that that condition was what cause me to suffer apotheosis and what little enlightenment I gained from it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9QI3nlinYQ

Regards
DL

I'm not interested in other people's opinions, they are as valid as yours are. You've said more than once that Christianity is "against" homosexuals so again I ask for proof. It's pretty easy to do, no? Post the bits in The Bible that advocate against homosexuality. You can even use google if you want, and if you fail (again) to find any evidence then at least be man enough to admit that you're wrong, that your entire argument is based on a lie. What's even more ironic is that you also claim (with a straight face) that Christianity is "becoming" homophobic\misogynistic despite many recent developments around female Bishops etc.

If you are so delusional that you cannot follow the history of gay and female persecution perpetrated by the church, you are to far gone for me to bother trying to bring back to reality.

I will grant that Christianity has been brought to heel by secular law which forbids Christian discrimination without a just cause.

Regards
DL

You get people who want to persecute gays and women in all sections of life, but correlation does not equal causation. If I find you a video of a homophobic NRA member, does that mean that the NRA teaches homophobia? No, so why do you assert that homophobic Christians are that way due to the teachings of their religion? Let's remember I've asked you to provide evidence of this homophobia in The Bible and you have repeatedly failed to do so.



You think the whole world bends its will to the tune of one country's laws? Who's delusional now....I'm going to guess you're American.

A poor guess. I am Canadian.

Too often have I done someone else's research just to have them attack the source and not the content.

Would a Christian church like this one that pushed for a death to gays law in Uganda be doing so without biblical guidance? If you think so, and for the proof you seek of the Christian anti-gay ideology, just go to your bible and plug in abomination and just read.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMw2Zg_ ... re=related

Regards
DL

I was close though But I was wrong there, I don't mind admitting that. See, when you're wrong you're wrong, there's no shame in admitting you're wrong.



I agree, however the issue here is that The Bible doesn't condemn homosexuality. You are saying it does, I am saying it doesn't. Now you can't prove a negative - I can't prove that something isn't in The Bible, so I'm afraid the only way to resolve this is for you to prove your side and show me where The Bible condemns homosexuality as a way of Christian life. I keep asking but you keep failing to deliver.


They must be because The Bible does not condemn homosexuality. You don't mind searching for, and posting links to YouTube videos, so why can't you simply give me chapter and verse instead?

Yes. It helps greatly to learn as much about the writer of any part of the Bible as what was written. Too many readers read a little about Paul and conclude that he hated women, etc., when he was actually quite daringly inclusive. The context that is provided by knowing the writer is, perhaps, more important than the words beacuse it creates context.

Because I am not your gopher and if you are that young or blind to what Christianity preaches then you are not worth my time.

Regards
DL

No. You can't because it's not possible because everything you are saying is based on ignorance.

This sounds like a language-barrier tiff. The biggest sponge in the universe, or the biggest beagle in the universe, if it was the universe as we experience it, couldn't be appealed to for solutions to personal problems - which was my point. We could be part of a very living universe with no 'God' of the variety that the Abrahamic traditions would try selling us but at the same time it wouldn't be a dead-matter mechanistic universe either. Also my saying that it was constructed of the 'love' of God wasn't in any way saying that it was love as we'd think of it at a personal level; ie. everything that can and would kill us is made of it as well, by it I mean the harmonic order that brings everything into coherence for us to be here in the first place.

Would it be possible for us to stick to written sources? I ask because really what's needed here is something along the lines of the broader historical and present (I would think near-unanimous) context - ie. is Gnosticism part and parcel with an actual, spiritual, transcendence. I've read a lot about it and I have to say that you're the first person I've met who'd argue that it's a symbolic approach to reductive materialism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gnosticism
http://www.iep.utm.edu/gnostic/
https://www.theopedia.com/gnosticism

While it wouldn't bother me at all if you simply said that you're a reductive materialist who likes the symbolism of gnosticism I think what's bothered me, almost from your first post in this forum, is that you claim to be speaking for more people than yourself or even the silent majority of modern gnostics. Being that I haven't heard any reductive materialists, even those I've met who practice ceremonial magic in the OTO as a form of psychological work, that refer to themselves as 'gnostics' and I think it's because of the associations that the word gnosis carries.


Condemned was what they thought of the 'hylics', ie. those who were very earthy/worldly. Many sects also believed that only men could go to heaven (which to be fair wasn't an uncommon belief among the Hellenistic philosophies). For those who did believe in reincarnation it's fair to say that condemnation could come in the form of just really crap incarnations of being a slave, having crippling diseases, etc..


Christianity was really just a somewhat inarticulate precursor to Neoplatonism as Plotinus came up with it - partly because one of the most critical and well known evangelists of the new testament, John, was a student of Philo Judaeus who was a well known Platonist and filtered his Judaism through it. This was only maybe a couple hundred years before the Sefir Yetzirah, ie Book of Formation, was written which encapsulates the core of what became the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.

The frustration I'm having, and I think the frustration I think a lot of people are having with these threads, are that they're stuck having to deal with Christianity and Gnosticism in some very cramped and poorly-informed frames based on the OP insistence that Gnosticism is materialist atheism for cool kids and that Christianity is an abusive pyramid-scheme for suckers on a foundational level and at the core of its contents. I don't identify as Christian but I can't agree with that take on the stories of Jesus (you'd have to add the Hindus as well for being suckers as they read his life story and added him as an avatar). You see agreement between the life of the Buddha, the life of Jesus, the life of many holy sages and it seems like the same mystery traditions were trying to describe the same sort of sainthood and achievement of grace between oneself and the universe.


Would you be able to link me to a scholarly source that defines Christian Gnosticism in that manner?


Do you think you might have meant to key 'AgnosticBishop'? It wouldn't have been inappropriate at all but I'm still confused why the constant conflation of materialism with Gnosticism.



For anything I read in the Nag Hammadi, Pistis Sophia, etc.. I still don't see anything that - in its entirety, even one book or chapter of a book, that suggests reductive materialism. The one thing that the Gnostics were, whether their sect was pessimistic or neutral on the material world or YHVH, is that they were emanationists - that is they believed that something of a very pure consciousness created in a series of step-downs and that, whether clean or dirty, the creation at the bottom was a conscious part of that cascade. Emanation is not reductive materialism.

Oh. You sure took a roundabout route to get here.

No need to try to impress.

I agree that man must come up with his own solutions.

Do try to use the KIS method and then we would not have a language-barrier tiff.

Regards
DL

I think that a lot of the confusion stems from people using the amounts of labels, that you also use, which have a number of definitions that have contradictions or ambiguities within those descriptions.

Best to ask a Gnostic Christian on specific issues if you need something expanded on or explained.

Take your ----"Would you be able to link me to a scholarly source that defines Christian Gnosticism in that manner?"

I don't know if such exists or not seeing as how ancient Gnostic Christianity is.

I can show two things though that tend to show that we do not see or believe in the supernatural.

http://bigthink.com/videos/what-is-god-2-2

Which lead us to the kind of writings that follow.

Gnostic Christian Jesus said, "If those who attract you say, 'See, the Kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you.
If they say to you, 'It is under the earth,' then the fish of the sea will precede you.
Rather, the Kingdom of God is inside of you, and it is outside of you.
[Those who] become acquainted with [themselves] will find it; [and when you] become acquainted with yourselves, [you will understand that] it is you who are the sons of the living Father.
But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty."

This shows that we venerate the flesh as it houses the only God any of us can ever truly find who dwells within ourselves.

Regards
DL