What are KF's thoughts on Gnostics?

[Some Badger]

Absolute cringe stupid motherfuckers that have too much free time and money to spend on ridiculous bullshit and self jerking "spirituality".
These niggers will either believe anything or make up any kind of shit to stroke their ego.

—St. Irenaeus, probably

 

[Yamaha YM2612]

The church acknowledges that Mary was born to human parents (this is dogma, in fact), and that is what makes the immaculate conception what it is: she was untainted by sin the moment of her conception.

no. her mother and father carried sin. One is only free of sin by the holy spirit. If Mary was without sin, SHE would have been the messiah

Jesus says she isn't the messiah

I believe it was Ambrose of Milan

So, just a rando making stuff up

who posited that the God personally blessed the union of Saints Joachim and Anna by way of granting them a child in their old age.

a blessed child =/= free of sin. Isaac was also a blessed child, as were all of the children born to rachel.

id have to check geneais again, but i think jacob and esau also were, as rebecca was barren iirc

I never said anything about Christ’s genealogy being a factor into his lack of sin.

sin is genetic, we inherit it from adam

The Catholic reasoning is that the Holy Spirit conceived the Son within the aforementioned sinless Mary.

No scripture indicates that Mary was sinless, and this supported by the epistles later. Everyone EXCEPT christ, had sin. That includes mary

 

[CAPTAIN HAPPY]

only free of sin by the holy spirit.

If Mary was without sin, SHE would have been the messiah
Jesus says she isn't the messiah

a blessed child =/= free of sin.

id have to check geneais again,

sin is genetic

No scripture indicates

The Power of American Protestant Shizophrenia??

Still not anywhere NEAR as nuts as all the gnostic anal sex cults.

 

[Thomas Talus]

Parthenogenesis could explain the virgin birth. All the other miraculous birth stories in myths could be explained this way.

In a mammal? Even aside from the issue of producing male offspring, that has only been observed when artificially-induced, and results in abnormal development of the child.

Cast out the heretics.

 

[Yamaha YM2612]

The Power of American Protestant Shizophrenia??

No, just the bible

The bible IS protestant of course (jesus was a protestant), but schizophrenia doesn't exist (made up by ✡) and these ideas predate america by 1700 years or so

 

[Some Badger]

Fuck it, I’m not here to debate Mariology with a Protestant, much less a triangled one so here’s my contribution to the Gnostic cringe peanut gallery:

While he was writing decades before the discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices, John Arendzen makes a convincing argument that Gnosticism is not actually an offshoot of early Christianity (much less its true form), but rather a syncretistic belief system that came from the further east and gradually made its way to major centers of learning like Alexandria.

The Gnostics, it is true, borrowed their terminology almost entirely from existing religions, but they only used it to illustrate their great idea of the essential evil of this present existence and the duty to escape it by the help of magic spells and a superhuman Saviour. Whatever they borrowed, this pessimism they did not borrow — not from Greek thought, which was a joyous acknowledgment of and homage to the beautiful and noble in this world, with a studied disregard of the element of sorrow; not from Egyptian thought, which did not allow its elaborate speculations on retribution and judgment in the netherworld to cast a gloom on this present existence, but considered the universe created or evolved under the presiding wisdom of Thoth; not from Iranian thought, which held to the absolute supremacy of Ahura Mazda and only allowed Ahriman a subordinate share in the creation, or rather counter-creation, of the world; not from Indian Brahminic thought, which was Pantheismpure and simple, or God dwelling in, nay identified with, the universe, rather than the Universe existing as the contradictory of God; not, lastly, from Semitic thought, for Semiticreligions were strangely reticent as to the fateof the soul after death, and saw all practical wisdom in the worship of Baal, or Marduk, or Assur, or Hadad, that they might live long on this earth.

Owing to the fact that there’s wildly varying forms of Gnostic thought like Valentinianism or Basilideanism, it’s unreliable to define them as a single religion, but they’re all similar in the sense that they believed the material world is fundamentally corrupted, so it’s no surprise that as an already existing school(s) of thought during apostolic times, Gnostic thinkers were eager to graft Christianity into their cosmology:

When Gnosticism came in touch with Christianity, which must have happened almost immediately on its appearance, Gnosticism threw herself with strange rapidity into Christianforms of thought, borrowed its nomenclature, acknowledged Jesus as Saviour of the world, simulated its sacraments, pretended to be an esoteric revelation of Christ and His Apostles, flooded the world with apocryphal Gospels, and Acts, and Apocalypses, to substantiate its claim. As Christianity grew within and without the Roman Empire, Gnosticism spread as a fungus at its root, and claimed to be the only true form of Christianity, unfit, indeed, for the vulgar crowd, but set apart for the gifted and the elect. So rank was its poisonous growth that there seemed danger of its stifling Christianity altogether, and the earliest Fathers devoted their energies to uprooting it. Though in reality the spirit of Gnosticism is utterly alien to that of Christianity, it then seemed to the unwary merely a modification or refinement thereof. When domiciled on Greek soil, Gnosticism, slightly changing its barbarous and Seminitic terminology and giving its "emanatons" and "syzygies" Greek names, sounded somewhat like neo-Platonism, thought it was strongly repudiated by Plotinus. In Egypt the national worship left its mark more on Gnostic practice than on its theories.

Christianity was ultimately incompatible with Gnostic tenets because Gnosticism presupposes that salvation is exclusive and most people are not worthy to even be offered the chance to pursue it. I don’t want to cite the gospels of Judas and Mary Magdalene too intensely because they’re both fragmentary, but my takeaway from reading both was that Judas and Mary found personal favor from Jesus over the rest of the disciples. I may be to set in a Christian worldview but it reads to me like fanfiction at best and subversive satire at worst.

If early Christianity is complicit in being unclear and chaotic in its doctrines prior to Chalcedon and Nicea, then Gnosticism is even more guilty of this by several orders of magnitude. Cosmologies vary wildly between sects. The Sophia myth exists in some but not others; the number of Æons ranges from twelve to thirty to eighty. The lack of consistency could arguably be derived from the fact that Gnostic sects may have sprung forth from different pre-existing pagan religions, and they only started to become known as “Gnostic” as Christianity and its rather legalistic academic culture spread throughout the Mediterranean in the first and second centuries.

In a sense, Gnosticism is like orobanche (also known as broomrape). It may look like a flower, but in actuality, it’s a parasite, and the unknowing observer wouldn’t know the difference. It latches onto the root systems of plants and pretends to grow alongside them, but they ultimately kill the plant if you don’t uproot them, if you catch my drift.

 

[StolenWindows]

But that isnt true. Mary had a mother and a father. Thus carried sin.

Ah, I love when satanists Catholics try to pretend God has limitations

Christ could be sinless even though his mother wasn't. Because he was conceived by the holy spirit

In fact much of jesus genealogy is comprised of sin (david, Solomon, abraham, etc)

We already have an explanation though, conception via the holy spirit.

Jesus was called "the second Adam" and Mary/Sophia was the second Eve.

 

[Yamaha YM2612]

Jesus was called "the second Adam" and Mary/Sophia was the second Eve.

Um...yes

 

[VM_]

Spengler said it best when he mentioned that the Magian culture triumphed over the old Greco-Roman pagan one, and the current Faustian age with its enlightenment push back against the church is a retaliation against the Magian culture they once adapted. All those Gnostic/Christian cults during late antiquity were an expression of the Magian culture adapting and swallowing up the old, decayed Greco-Roman classical one.


Is it "Christian" virtues or pagan ones? Obviously it's a mixture of both, but pure Christianity doesn't exist, just how people groups and their laws accommodate it. There's a reason why Protestants ended up just larping as Old Testament Jews when they retaliated against the Greco-Roman Catholic Church. Sola scriptura!

 

[PandaChai]

Basically every Church Father called the whole lot of it demonic heresy, so I'm going to follow their lead.

 

[Rekieta’s Broken Penis]

Jesus, too, often challenged or overturned literal OT commandments (‘you have heard it said… but I say to you,’ Matthew 5).

This is a good example of the lies you are telling. Jesus didn’t challenge or overturn the OT commandments here, he extended them. He extends guilt from conduct to intent and desire. Gnostics are all like this because it’s literally a skitzo religion for the mentally ill. The only people I’ve ever known into it IRL are mentally ill. Like skitzo and psychosis.

 

[StolenWindows]

This is a good example of the lies you are telling. Jesus didn’t challenge or overturn the OT commandments here, he extended them. He extends guilt from conduct to intent and desire. Gnostics are all like this because it’s literally a skitzo religion for the mentally ill. The only people I’ve ever known into it IRL are mentally ill. Like skitzo and psychosis.

But the Bible said you're forgiven if you believe in Christ. Not if you follow by all 613 laws. Jesus said he fulfilled the law because he was perfect and sinless. It's not that you can continue to live in sin as a genuine believer in Christ, it's that Christ took your sin away.

 

[StolenWindows]

Also, you people put too much faith in the church than you do faith in God. The church is an idol. God's word comes first (John 1:1).

What came first? THE WORD! Gnosticism is a form of universalism.

 

[StolenWindows]

Thread theme:

 

[StolenWindows]

Btw, this is your brain on atheism. I've studied computer science and yhat's what actually converted me from Atheist of 15 years to a fucking panentheist. Engineering shatters atheism. When you're building a submachine gun, can you just throw in unworking parts and parts yhat serve no function and expect it to work? Computers simulate real-life. A mechanical calculator will never be perfect. An electronic one would. But atheists deny Hawking radiation and entropy as if they're pseudoscience. If time were perfectly linear, time travel and retrocausality should be impossible. But it isn't ("torsion fields"). That's exotic matter. Life is infinite recursion. It flips like a page on a sticky note pad of a ball bouncing up and down. A simulation - a substrate. Look into Ekpyrotic theory (life is an endless loop). Time travels in linear cycles, but it traverses like the spiral on the inside of a gun (the rifling twist). The ancient sumerians had a snake icon of a double helix structure in ancient civilization! The demiurge (annunaki) created humanity through the fall of Sophia. The truth's in the sand.

 

[23iwakura23]

—St. Irenaeus, probably

More or less...

By means of specious and plausible words, they cunningly allure the simple-minded to inquire into their system; but they nevertheless clumsily destroy them, while they initiate them into their blasphemous and impious opinions, and ruin them by leading them away to falsehood. For error, indeed, is never set forth in its naked deformity, lest, being thus exposed, it should at once be detected. But it is craftily decked out in an attractive dress, so as, by its outward form, to make it appear to the inexperienced (ridiculous as the expression may seem) more true than the truth itself

Irenaeus, Adversus Haeresis, Book I, preface.

 

[Althalus]

Gnosticism has the same problem as Protestantism, in that the lack of central structure allows for endless re-interpretations of theology and scripture. I am somewhat sympathetic to historical Gnostics because (as much as modern Christians dislike the notion) Gnostics had clear explanations to philosophical questions that later Christians spent centuries debating (e.g. "the problem of evil"). Granted many of their derivative sects were rather lolcowish and taught ideas like "the world is so evil that we should castrate ourselves". But, even for "Christian" Gnostics, their basic philosophy was not really conducive to worldly success because it taught that the material world itself was evil, so Gnostics kept to themselves and wouldn't pay church tithes or serve in the military, or even reproduce. Such an ideology is never going to build great empires and thus is inherently self-limiting.

Self-mortification, pacifism, and abstinence was commonplace in early Christianity, so it is pretty obvious that the persecution of Gnostics was less about having lolcow beliefs (as justified by their persecutors after the fact) and more about them refusing to participate in society and obey Roman Catholic authority.

 

[Rekieta’s Broken Penis]

But the Bible said you're forgiven if you believe in Christ. Not if you follow by all 613 laws. Jesus said he fulfilled the law because he was perfect and sinless. It's not that you can continue to live in sin as a genuine believer in Christ, it's that Christ took your sin away.

nigger what the fuck are you talking about?

Jesus said here’s the laws and in fact don’t just follow the letter of the law, follow the spirit of the law. This was a teaching against Pharisees who followed the letter but ignored the intent, indeed their descendants today do shit like wear wigs made of human hair, so that they can go out and look hot without “showing their hair”. Explain how what he said was teaching against the Mosaic Law?

 

[Cnidarian]

It's the nerdy boy's way of being "spiritual but not religious", they'll show their fake modesty off with platitudes but they'll still call you a soulless android at the drop of the hat for not being as self-pitying as them. Pretty much all of the core problems with normal religious people and none of the upsides. You're not a free thinker for reading intentionally useless trivia books.

 

[StolenWindows]

nigger what the fuck are you talking about?

Jesus said here’s the laws and in fact don’t just follow the letter of the law, follow the spirit of the law. This was a teaching against Pharisees who followed the letter but ignored the intent, indeed their descendants today do shit like wear wigs made of human hair, so that they can go out and look hot without “showing their hair”. Explain how what he said was teaching against the Mosaic Law?

Shut yo stupid ass up, nigga.