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The 'worldbuilding' of it is quite cool. Funny worm god (yaldabaoth), interesting 'secret twist'. Ties to more ancient religions (manichaeism).
Shame that one of the primary historical 'reasons' it exists is antisemitism. TLDR, is it was made as kinda of a way to say 'the old testament (jewish) god was a fake evil demiurge, and to worship him is to worship evil'. So, just a different way of wording 'jews actually worship satan'.
Jewish gnosticism also existed, maybe even before Christian gnosticism. Arguably Christianity grew out of a Jewish gnostic movement. I think that some Jewish sects differentiate between the gods "El" and "Yahweh" from the old testament and they consider "El" to be the demiurge and "Yahweh" to be the god of light.
It would make sense that this occurred after some heavy cultural borrowing from the zoroastrian Persians who had a dualistic cosmology
dont christians also worship the demiurge?
Yes, but its beside the point. With Jesus being jewish, its jews who 'tricked' people into worshipping the demiurge. Its that classic "jews are tricksters, christains are just people who got tricked" bullshit. And, just overall, a lot of their teachings are just, inherently 'twisting' a lot of jewish era mysticism around, which is of course funny in a way, considering how much they also steal from jewish mysticism.
Regardless, all of that is more or less history; I don't think people calling themselves gnostic today are generally specifically anti-semetic. And its not like Christianity of the era was particularly accepting of jews.
He comes across evil in the book
in my opinion the gnostics were a set of disparate groups in early christianity. at best gnosis (knowledge) meant an explicit rejection of the roman imperial system, slavery, debt, gender, property, and the ideological superstructure that went along with it (the illusions created by the demiurge), in favor of a quasi-materialist search for truth and meaning in the manifestations of god in the world around us. at worst it seems to have meant a complete rejection of the material world, with gnosis meaning that knowledge derived from hallucinations.
either way, they were disorganized. their rejection of roman imperialism did little to end roman imperialism. the bishop system (from biscop, from episkopos, literally "overseer") was able to fit within the roman system, so as that spread and cemented itself as the official religion of the empire over the 3rd and 4th centuries, the gnostics were labelled as heretics and squashed. if they really wanted to defeat the demiurge they should have formed a vanguard party.
so to develop on @CascadeOfLight's idea, it's marxism-leninism-maoism that's the only path to reach sophia and defeat the demiurge
no gnosis, no right to preach!
no gnosis, no right to preach!
:michael-laugh:
I'm upset that I'll never be able to quote this in real life because no one I know exists at the intersection that is Maoist Gnosticism (Gnostic Maoism?)
Really neat, excellent source of inspiration for fiction, video game plots especially.
Please don't attempt believing in any form of magic IRL.
shit i gotta go return all these candles
That Marxism is the only path to reach Sophia and defeat the demiurge
It's horseshit, just like every other aspect of religion.
Knowledge is reactionary. Don't know things.
The demiurge is a better solve to the problem of evil than anything orthodox christianity has to offer. That elegance makes it attractive. But as someone else mentioned it's antithetical to materialism and ultimately not of any real use.
Because of the dualism, it's really easy to get navel gazy with it. Like, why make a cursed world better instead of just pursuing internal spiritual salvation and just eternally looking inward?
What do you think about Gnosticism?
I have no opinion
Missed opportunity to say you're agnostic.
Religion is cool and good if it is used as a path or tool towards personal growth or introspection. Religion is bad and harmful when it is used as a path of outward projection.
I know people of pretty much all religions who don't use those religions to excuse harmful views and instead use those religions as an excuse to push themselves to be better humans and I see nothing wrong with that.
I know this community is borderline anti religious so blast me in the comments
what does any of that have to do with gnosticism? there's very little organized these days, even less in the anglosphere, and the newage crystal hippie woo stuff isn't much older than scientology.
I don't like the "g".
Most religions aren't good to be taken at face value.
At the very least, the spiritual understanding of an adult should be a lot more developed and sophisticated than that of a small child. Tens of millions of people accept a religious summary that is designed to be spoonfed to children. Also, children should not be taken to religious services until they are old enough to consciously choose this themselves.
I don't know about the last part. Children need structure. Ritual and drama speak to children quite well.
Children should not, by any means, be actively primed and trained to be adherents of a particular religion. I shouldn't have to spell that out, it's not controversial or dubious at all.
I don't suppose you experienced going to religious services regularly as a kid?
any unfalsifiable assertion is worthless trash and isn't a path to knowledge unless you really want to undermine the entire concept of knowing things. not sure how one would simultaneously claim to know stuff and that knowledge can't hold certainty.
note that we don't strictly need to be able or particularly likely to find or demonstrate the counter-evidence. Evolutionary biology would have to be reevaluated if modern rabbit fossils were found in the precambrian sediment layers, but rabbits are small so we could go a while simply not finding them.
not sure how one would simultaneously claim to know stuff and that knowledge can't hold certainty.
That's a soluble problem. Solutions like pragmatism have been offered.
I don't really have one, I don't know much about it.
I once read a book that called gnosticism, "neoplatonism for the proletariat." It wasn't a very good book.
I don't really know a whole lot about anything that isn't relevant to Cruelty Squad but I have noticed that a lot of fundamentalist hardliners have a on-and-off habit of insinuating anything or anyone they're opposed to is secretly tied to Gnosticism in some way so I figure they weren't (aren't?) that bad
I don't...
spoiler
"gno?" 
a rimshot plays in background
Interesting
It's kinda trippy. Which is wild, since religions can get trippy. More agnostic myself.
AFAIK Gnosticism says "don't cum, but straight sex is OK" and if you have gay sex you get dark side super powers
I wish I knew more about it.
Seems like a twilight zone between the riotous paganism of the old days and the abrahamic aridity after.
as someone who has had varied religious experiences in the past, its is always healthy to question whether you are being lied to by an evil demon when it seems like god/the gods are talking to you. i like that the end-goal of gnosticism is to redeem yaldabaoth instead of destroying it. not a fan of the whole 'no engaging with the physical world' rules it shares with many other religions and systems of mysticism, dis-inhibitory spiritual practices can be just as psychologically effective for some people as inhibitory practices. also not a fan of the baked-in gender/sex essentialism common to these kinds of belief systems, you find this even with modern recreations of ancient beliefs like wicca, even sci fi like Dune has firm demarcations along gender lines regarding who is powerful enough to survive space witch training or drinking sandworm deathpiss. having external or internal genitals or having an x or y chromosome probably isn't some spiritual marker of your ultimate destiny or metaphysical identity or something. also the notion of 'hylics', people who are fundamentally incapable of spiritual growth due to a lack of 'sophia', is pretty toxic.
as a genuinely curious seeker of truth and meaning, i rate gnosticism like 5/10, better attitudes especially towards spiritual inquiry than garden variety christianity and more interesting beliefs, and has a history of some kind of anti-imperialism and repression by hegemonic powers, but suffers from the same flaws as many religions such as gender essentialism, rejection of the physical world, overly complicated and dubious creation myths that have at best vague metaphorical truths contained within that the original authors likely never intended or that modern audiences will never interpret correctly without context, and a holier-than-thou attitude towards nonbelievers ('hylics').
Nah, also its used an antisemitic whistle quite a bit. However, I will give its sure fun to whine about existence not being ideal, but ultimately we made things shitty as they are with social superstructures, not ideas running around our heads like gods and demons, though sure there's some things like aging or pain. The gnostic communities in antiquity had a proto communalism thing going which was interesting, the physical world is evil yet the ideal world of myths that has little comfort beyond ideal is a 'good', makes me think about to the day of Plato where the demiurge was a good god rather than an evil trickster.
Always weirded me out how Sophia basically abandoned the demiurge as 'evil' instead of trying to fix him, deny the aeons' judgement and support her baby, she went on to fix the souls that wandered into her son's creation, seems like a standard mother vs son spat using the grandchildren as pawns, but religious myths and abusive backstories, our gods crafted in our own form, its like looking in a mirror. Also the way its written makes it seem like the evil was written into that cosmology long before the demiurge rolled out onto the scene, probably back in the day of primordial chaos, who is beyond good and evil like such creator-gods tend to be, perhaps by using dialectics so advanced they can modulate their reality, lol.
When I lived in the city, a neighbor jazz musician would call the kids that for a time kept trying to set firecrackers under cars on our street 'demon children of Yaldabaoth''.
