>Gnosticism believes that the God of the Old Testament (Yahweh) wasn't the real God but was a soulless physical abomination called the Demiurge accidentally created by an aspect of the Real God.
>This Demiurge, lacking divinity was unaware of Real God, and so thought that it WAS God. He created the physical universe as well as Adam and Eve in his image, and demanded to be worshipped under threat of punishment. Real God took pity on them and gave them souls, and then sent the Serpent into the garden to give them knowledge of their own spiritual nature so that they could escape the Demiurge's rule as well as transcend the physical world into the spiritual.
>In this interpretation, original sin doesn't exist, and Eve eating the fruit and gaining knowledge wasn't something that damned humanity, but rather saved it.
>Also, they still believe Jesus is divine, and that he’s of the real God, not the Demiurge. This is the Gnostic explanation as to why the Old Testament God is kind of a tyrant/psycho who smites people and makes rather horrid demands under threats while Jesus was all "peace and love."
This is more unironically logically than what mainstream Christians believe.
If you don't embrace Gnosticism, you are a slave to the Demiurge.

>>17898862 (OP)
The narrative about angels breeding a race of mankind into existence and trapping their spirit in that flesh is the "biblical" variant

>>17898862 (OP)
Gnosticism is bullshit, but the God in the Old Testament is a projection man made, that's why this God has human flaws. Man was projecting.

Presenting that narrative as the teachings of Gnosticism is like saying that Luther's writings represent all of prot thought. Gnostics were as divided and incoherent as their modern prot successors

>>17898862 (OP)
>Do the Jews worship Saturn or the Demurige
>Is the demurige good but nevertheless presiding over an imperfect creation (Platonism) evil (Gnosticism) or ignorant (Hinduism).

Gnosticism is just early Christian fanfiction.

>>17898862 (OP)
Gnosticism was never meant to be a religion in the normal sense, but rather another aspect to view the Biblical narrative from for the purpose multiple perspectives on a complex object.

>>17898862 (OP)

Fuck off, schizo.

>>17899517
blease go back to r*ddit, your opinions are retarded and tripfags are gay. thx.

>>17899346
>Constantine decides what "true Christianity" is in 325
Hail the Emperor?

>>17898862 (OP)
>the Demiurge accidentally created by an aspect of the Real God.
do... real God is a retarded hack?

>>17899643
The Gnostic Monad doesn't really seem like an anthropomorphic entity in the same way as Yahweh. There are never any statements from it and it doesn't have agendas or interests, it's just kind of a principle. Sophia is the higher active agent in the material world

>>17899643
>>17899693
I like Gnostic Christianity, but of the texts we have their way of dealing with the problem of evil is still a mess. There are at least seven narratives with varying levels of mythologization at odds with each other trying to explain how you get from a good God at the bottom of everything to a mistake to a world full of evil. And how is it that the God at the bottom of everything has "all power" so that "nothing rules over it" (apoc. John) but it's able to coexist with evil? The answers I've come across seems to be that either its inert, "its rest cannot be disturbed" (apoc. John) -- but then it's confusing how or why it emanated the pleroma full of aeons who do act (and why are those aeons not powerful enough to easily fix the problem?) -- or else evil is somehow illusory from the highest perspective, "the good are not good, the bad are not bad, life is not life, and death is not death" (Gosp. Philip).

So I don't know. I like that Gnosticism engages with the problem of evil and is unwilling to attribute the world directly to the action of a truly good God apparently revealed through gnosis, but it seems like a satisfying understanding of exactly how the metaphysics should work either got lost in transmission or just isn't something they were able to put into words effectively. Or maybe I just don't understand it yet.

Some nice blog posts I found on the topic:
https://ogdoas.wordpress.com/2012/10/29/the-pattern-of-gnostic-truth/
https://ogdoas.wordpress.com/2012/12/31/on-the-origin-of-evil/