>>24686740
That's fair, I never really developed the cynical feeling towards religion that many ex-Christians (for good reason) have, so that may be part of why I can still appreciate it as I do. I agree that there is some underlying "force" responsible for the fact that there is something instead of nothing, and religions do strive to answer this question. This is why I consider myself an agnostic and not an atheist. I have very little faith in our ability to come to any truthful conclusions regarding this problem in an unbiased manner however; I think our brains obscure the truth of reality much more than we realize, and many of the typical answers that religions provide about the nature of the world (such as ascribing the creation thereof to a conscious entity, or even the belief in a moment of creation in general) say more about how our minds operate than about any fundamental truths of reality. I don't even think we can get to the point where we know which questions to ask. I read about Julian Jaynes' theory of bicameral mentality somewhat early in life, and it really contributed to my understanding of religion as a psychological phenomenon that's not capable of truthfully answering these deep existential questions. Plato's cave is deeper than we can ever comprehend.

Regarding Gnosticism, I see it more as an answer to the problem of evil and the discrepancies between Yahweh and the father of Jesus, rather than an attempt to answer fundamental metaphyiscal questions regarding reality. If I were to believe in it, it would be for that reason, and not the fact that it answers existential questions better than mainstream Christianity. That being said, I'm not sure how familiar you are with the origins of Gnosticism, but does take a lot of influence from Platonic/Neoplatonic ideas (Plato's theory of forms and a more perfect, higher level of reality, the concept of the monad as the featureless, absolute progenitor of all), and these schools of thought might have the answers you're looking for. I view mainstream Christianity and Gnosticism as existing along a "platonic slider," each with different levels of Greek influence. Christian concepts like the eternal soul came from Greek philosophy; the OT Israelites did not believe in an eternal soul, rather that you were dust with the breath of God blown into you that simply evaporates when you die, much as your own breath does. So in my view it's not a matter of looking deeper into Christianity, but how much your branch of Christianity is influenced by Greek philosophy. As a personal tangent, the Hebrew concept of the soul makes much more sense to me and is more in line with basic biology than Plato's concept of the eternal soul, which I also believe is a product of our psychological makeup and the urge to see yourself as eternal (or rather, the fear of seeing yourself as ephemeral).