Can someone give me a quick rundown on what Gnosticism even is?

Not even close retard.

Any specific sayings? I've looked over it but that's about it. The gnostic gospels seem very Christian, so I can't help but think the Church and imperial authority invented "orthodox" Christianity without any real foundation.

Gospel of Thomas is a good start. Just as a whole it seems very convincing.

That one's okay. A lot of the other shit is pretty obviously unable to establish orthodoxy. I mean sure, Catholic Church decided the canon but that doesn't mean they "made it up". They made choices for political and theological reasons. They did a good job at preserving Greek knowledge in the medieval period and stability.

outdated bullshit.

You're wrong to identify OT YHVH/Elohim with the demiurge. There are some strains of Gnosticism that had this kind of interpretation, but most didn't.

What the fuck is your evidence for this? Seems like totally ad-hoc reasoning on your part.

any redpill on these guys?

Just play Undertale, it's close enough.

Thanks for that, I'm still learning like the OP.

Demiurge or not, it seems like a negative view of the OT god is an underlying unity to them. Or are there any that were different?

Vague self contradictory bullshit pushed by the Rothschild's to undermine Christianity

In my woefully uninformed opinion it is a variant of 'let's just universalize this one element of metaphysics into being everything'

>redpill
drop this from your vocabulary immediately

on an anonymous form there is no need to signal your status in social hierarchies by not using words considered to belong to low status groups and individuals

There is if you don't want me to call you a fucking faggot.
If you don't think the reactions and conversations you have on here are strongly affected by your posting style and word choice, you don't pay very much attention.

You calling me a faggot is meaningless though. You're calling a post without even a name or a link to other posts a faggot. I'm not even the guy who said 'redpill'. It just makes you look overly emotional and absurd

Redpill triggers me cause I am a closet redpill much like how faggot triggers you cause you are a closet faggot. Now gtfo my board.

Ignore him, his kind are very afraid of any potential redpills

>on an anonymous form there is no need to signal your status in social hierarchies by not using words considered to belong to low status groups and individuals
Mhm. Unless someone says they're an actual oppressed minority. In which case you call them a slut or a nigger or a kike.

Why would any sane person want to distance themselves from the nazi faggotry on this side is absurd, no?

because you can't distance yourself, there is no you. I'm not trying to be pretentious here, there is literally no identity at all. Every time you post you are another user with no connection to what you've said in the past on this website

I understand the knee-jerk desire to not be associated with nazis, but it makes no sense here

Sounds like CHIM but irl

also Jews, women, and blacks are not considered low status in our society. It is incredibly gauche to criticize these groups, whereas criticizing Nazis is not only permissible but usually required

Not him but there were disagreements and theological splits by the apostles. The Christianity that was accepted by the imperial authority was eventually the one Paul formulated, and Paul himself argued with the apostles. Jesus is already quite secretive in the gospels, so it's not difficult to imagine he told them different things or clarified it differently to them.

And yet, if you'll notice, you have (or whoever posted about it originally has) received no responses to the question. You don't have an identity, no, but when you follow certain patterns like falling into redpill terminology or throwing around the words chad and stacy you signal a lot of your ideology at once and get responses accordingly. To claim anonymity makes this impossible is simply wrong.

you're right I guess

It is esoteric Christianity, based solely on the Christ myth and relies heavily on apocalyptism and parables/metaphors to teach people the gnosis. some strains, quite a few, view the god of the OT as the Demiurge not the ultimate God and they usually go further by declaring him to be Evil and identified with satan (which is correct). They are persecuted to this day by Christian apologists who go out of their way to discredit the schools of thought. Most Gnostic sects are older than the Church or are contemporaneous with early christianity. They present a legitimacy crisis, also worth pointing out that Egyptian and Greek mysticism from late antiquity is extremely obvious which despoils christianity for a lot of people. When you line up christianity with other cults and you realize its just a bastardization with jew stuff then it becomes less palatable or authoritative. atheists here will mock it because its a direct challenge to their world, christians will condemn or edit it because it threatens their blood cult. Important to remember that the Bible was not assembled until after the start of the 4th century and the Torah wasn’t until late antiquity. So, there’s reason to believe its not the word of God and that its extremely edited and has been paraed improperly by theologians for millenia. Remember Catholics are pedo blood drinkers and Lutherans are capitalist psychopaths, their faith is evil and rotten to its core. Anything that could annihilate old hierarchies is going to be treated with scorn
many of the books were written before or at the time of the accepted canon and were conspicuously left out because they challenged the priesthood and church’s authority. many of them are also not misogynistic, or spirit hating like christian exoteric religion is. also all exoteric religions censor or put prohibitions on esoteric practice as a rule

Wait so do Gnostics think Jesus is divine or not?

“Demiurge” (from demiourgos: craftsman) refers to the creator of the physical world. Many Gnostics view the creator as malevolent or foolish, and as such dislike the OT God as the OT God is literally the demiurge. Many other strains don’t dislike the demiurge, and as such don’t dislike the OT God. I’m not sure what the other user meant

Nearly all do. The Mandaens don’t, and there are a few others. A lot of Gnostics are what Christians call “adoptionists,” meaning they believe Jesus was not born divine but later became divine

>me a white man is more opressed than anyone else
Is that what you tell people when they ask why you dropped out of high school to marry your pregnant cousin?

"In the Pistis Sophia, Christ is sent from the Godhead in order to bring Sophia back into the fullness (Pleroma). Christ enables her to again see the light, bringing her knowledge of the spirit (Greek: pneuma, πνευμα). Christ is then sent to earth in the form of the man Jesus to give men the Gnosis needed to rescue themselves from the physical world and return to the spiritual world."

I didn't say oppressed, though the only actual legally enshrined discrimination is indeed against white and asian men.

But this isn't about oppression, it is about status in society, and what I said about criticism of groups is true. That is the entire Leftist structure after all, find low-performing groups and offer them social status in exchange for allegiance to the Leftist project.

Extreme philosophical similarity, extreme similarity in the images and parables uses, also psychological similarity, the general character of Jesus ringing true when compared with his portrayals in the gospels

>low-performing groups
You mean oppressed minorities? Yes, they do tend to do "perform lower" than oppressive majorities with disproportionate wealth and power. Shame we offered them "social status" and now you have to compete with them for women and jobs on an even playing field. Truly awful the fate of white men...

I am not complaining, I am capable of thinking about things without resorting to claims of oppression.

As for their low performance, for blacks it is because their IQ is very low on average, for women it is mostly about motivation, and Jews don't perform badly at all, but actually much better than white people, because of their high IQ.

The playing field is not even in any case, the score requried for a black person to get into university is much lower than that required for an Asian person. There is no sense of the term 'even playing field' that would include that scenario.

As for white men, everybody gets what they deserve, if white men are losing power that is their fault.

Gnostics believe the Christ was divine and that he either appeared in a man, Jesus or was incarnated as Jesus

I don't think diathelitism was resolved by the time of gnosticism.

It's aso bullshit to claim that Christianity has no esotericism or mysticism like who you can tell is obviously insane with his thinly veiled antisemitic paranoia.

>Reality is a chain of demiurges
any more elaboration you can provide?

>Remember Catholics are pedo blood drinkers
You're a fucking moron.

You clearly have no idea what you're talking about please don't pretend that you do

Best answer in the thread

Lowkey what the fuck even is all that aeon shit?

Nigga, (((they))) fund both sides of each war from time immemorial. They also created christianity

wrong. Cronos devoured it.
We're mortal now. Saturn churns out that song all the livelong day.

>some strains, quite a few, view the god of the OT as the Demiurge not the ultimate God and they usually go further by declaring him to be Evil and identified with satan (which is correct).

What kind of a dipshit makes a claim like this? You seem mentally unstable, but why do you have to be such a cock about it?

True, any recommend reading material on this?

Gnosticism is a worldview, and a style of Christianity exemplifying that worldview.

The main points are:
>Man exists in a fallen state (as in orthodox Christianity)
>But this fallenness is not due to sin, but because the material world is fundamentally flawed
>Salvation comes through knowledge, which requires a receptive audience combined with a messenger from above (classically Jesus)
>The creator of the material world is not a true deity, but a lower being of some sort, sometimes a malevolent one
>The material world is encased in a series of 'heavens' ruled by the demiurge possibly along with a hierarchy of achons / 'rulers' that are often vested in keeping mankind enchained in the material world
>Beyond the archons / demiurge lies the Pleroma, which is composed of Aeons, who are descended from the Invisible God / the Father, out of which everything emanates
>the material world was created as a mistake or abortive act, when a lower Aeon (often Sophia) tried to create something on her own separate form the Father, which was the demiurge / Yaldabaoth / Saklas / Samael / Sabaoth, who then proceeded to mold the world we inhabit, and entrap souls within it
>human beings (or at least, those who are receptive to gnosis) are not creatures of flesh, but of a divine substance emanating from the Father, which are trapped in the lower material realm, and yearns to return
>sometimes, there is a notion of rebirth and recycling until gnosis is achieved, similar to samsara / moksha
>Jesus generally seen as divine, but his materiality is downplayed, thought to be son of the Invisible Father, not the demiurge, who is often identified with the Jewish deity (Yahweh / Jehovah / etc.) and/or Satan (sometimes, Satan is the son of the demiurge)
>the importance of Jesus is in his life as a teacher and giver of knowledge, not as the sacrificial lamb – lack of emphasis on the crucifixion and more on his sayings, sometimes docetic / mythological elements to Jesus' life

Where can I find an up-to-date, all-in-one version of the Nag Hammadi Codices that's not cucked by political correctness? The most recent edition of the Nag Hammadi Scriptures replaces terms like 'Father' with 'Parent', 'Son of Man' with 'Child of Humanity', and references of God as 'He' and 'Him' with 'It'.

New Age is just the Southern Baptism of the occult.

That sounds like something an agent of the Demifaggot would say.

It's Christianized paganism. It means secret knowledge and it comes in all sorts of different varieties with some being more ridiculous than others. The most popular being Mormonism. The early forms were attempts to reconcile or combine paganism with the growing Christian movement.

>the most popular being mormonism

not that user but if demiurge was Atheist Zero, all the edgelords of every generation are his disciples

Not that anom, but the universe, if understood as mathematics, can be seen as arising from nothing (the true god) due to a bunch of empty sets containing more empty sets. This allows for distinguishability which allows counting which allows numbers which allow ever more complex mathematical structures.