Why isn't Manichaeism and Gnosticism a thing today?

Why isn't Manichaeism and Gnosticism a thing today?

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Because the power of Jesus stopped it

Manicheanism cratered too hard.
Gnosticism did too, but at that point we're talking about dozens of sects with scores of doctrinal variants. The explosion of early Christianity was remarkable, and in well populated regions. Manicheans were often in the backwater regions and after pissing off the Chinese and Sassanids hard enough they had to deal with two imperial religions powers collapsing on them rather than just one. Our knowledge of both was fragmentary for way too long. Gnostics have a leg up in two respects: They weren't an entirely separate NRM but rather attached to a broader religion, while Manicheans were far more marginal, and we've got the advantage of the Nag Hammadi corpus while the original Sacred Books of Manicheanism are still lost (afaik).

There's actually a fair bit of decent Gnostic exegesis but it's hard to find under all the moonbat conspiracy sermons pure misinfo.

They talk about gnosticism on /x/.
Also that guy that always posts a laughing overwatch character

There are still some Mandaeans

>Mandaeans
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandaeans
ouch. sucks to be them.

I was just reading some gnostic texts earlier today.
It seems like they made up a bunch of their own mythos though and it wasn't directly related to Jesus's ministry. At least that's my take on it.

The rise of Islam squashed it.

There are practicing gnostics today, you just happened not to be aware.

it´s all over popular culture, books, films, music etc.

>it´s all over popular culture, books, films, music etc.

Whut?

Matrix comes to mind.

Because it's heresy

>anti-natalism
>material world is literally created by the devil
>kys & don't fuck or enjoy life to be saved
have a guess

also The Truman Show is the ultimate gnostic flick

>material world is literally created by the devil

Judging by my everyday experience, this is likely true.

>They talk about gnosticism on /x/.
No they don't, they talk about /pol/ and /fringe/ memes.

The Mandaean texts are nifty.

Depends on which Gnosticism we're talking about, again there are dozens of sects. I see very very little that conflicts with mainstream Christian theology in the Coptic Gospels.

They'd pissed off the Zoroastrians for a few hundred years by the time Islam came on the scene but it sure didn't help.

Eh, I've only seen a few Gnostic outfits that could fully be called Gnostic.

>material world is literally created by the devil
That's nowhere NEAR a universal doctrine in Gnostic groups.

They were killed, sadly

Manichaeism is... hard. It involved the Elect and Hearers. The Elect were not allowed to do anything but atone for the sins of mankind in hopes of being saved. They could not kill anything... ANYTHING. That included plants. The Hearers were more regular folks who could get married and harvest vegetables and grains. They had to feed the Elect so the Elect could atone for the sins of both for eating food. Oh yeah, everything was evil and had evil in it. It was also evil to kill something evil... so lots of guilt in that religion. That meant that you could have a massive class of people dedicated to doing NOTHING but praying and atoning non-stop for the rest of the population rushing their entire lives to feed the people responsible for saving their immortal souls. Crazy

>ouch. sucks to be them.

They are a respected minority. They are considered People of the Book in Islam. It sucks to be anyone at this moment, but I doubt it "sucked" before recently, just because they're a minority. Despite how some people think the Middle East works. So I hope your first reaction about any ME minority isn't just "sucks to be them" as that is naive.

Maybe for Manichaeism, but the rest of the branches was purged by Christians

Don’t forget China, it was apparently the last place it existed.

>anti-natalism
>material world is literally created by the devil

But isn't that one of the major (to dumb it down) tenets of Buddhism?

Eh, in Buddhism the world is cyclical and mostly just an unsatisfactory illusion. There's no point in killing yourself, since the "self" at once doesn't exist, and also your experience will keep going if you didn't extinguish it. I can't recall any actual anti-natalism though.

Not giving a fuck is the first focus, but the Buddha also taught that the world still had a lot of interesting spiritual things and it was swell to appease them, and Theravada involves a lot of those interesting ties to old Hindu views. It's like if Gnosticism was at once toned down on the material hating (no point in hating it, since it isn't real, was the view), and also tied heavily to old Canaanite religion more closely rather than just letting the weird metaphysics come from whatever they could imagine without any ties to a previous worldview asides from some normal Christian influence.

Then the second vehicle in Buddhism went and turned towards salvation of others through compassion by helping them get out of the world. It made more philosophical considerations for what it all meant, and how the transmigration of the soul can be fit with the denial of the soul. The focus shifted from "the world is bad" to "lets fix this".

It's still wrong, but it had a hook in the world that Gnosticism never did. I wonder if they wanted their doctrine to leave the world they despised with them?

>I can't recall any actual anti-natalism though
Because that wouldn't do anything to help remove anyone from the world. What good does it do to deny another human body, if they might just end up coming back as a monkey? If you wanted to take that line of thinking to it's completion you'd have to prevent everyone from having kids, and every animal that experiences things and even then they could come back as a plant or a rock. Basically you'd destroy the world, and even then their world is cyclical or multiple so it'd all come back. To say nothing of the fact that whole business may operate outside time.

Anti-natalism is incompatible with Buddhism. Either it's pointless because there is no self to occupy the new baby in the first place, or because that continuation of consciousness will find somewhere else to carry on no matter what.

Anti-natalism is the position that gives negative value to birth.

From the Buddha's words, "birth is suffering, aging is suffering, sickness is suffering, etc..."

Buddhism is anti-natal in position, just not the anti-natal that modernism would like to expand to and find the solution towards. Buddhist solution isn't to kill yourself or to kill your families.

>The Elect were not allowed to do anything but atone for the sins of mankind in hopes of being saved.
>The Hearers were more regular folks who could get married and harvest vegetables and grains. They had to feed the Elect so the Elect could atone for the sins of both for eating food.

I think manicheanism might be a solution to the problem of jobs lost to automation.

>no point in hating it, since it isn't real, was the view
Plenty of Gnostic outfits come really close to this flavor of nondualism, such as the Barbeloites.

What are the best books about them?

Elaine Paigels the gnostic gospels

Gnosticism is still alive today. It lives on in Western Esotericism. The Nag Hammadi text helped alot. Manicheaism is kind of an odd doctrine. It requires vegetarianism which supposedly release some sort of spirits that need to be released. I don't remember if that rule applied to everyone though.

Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism is the absolutely god-tier book for anyone who wants to know about gnosism beyond memes.

that's one sect. Gnositcism was not an organized religion with set dogma like Christianity.

That’s why Manicheism ‘invented’ back then. Mesopotamia was one of the centers of ancient automaton manufacturing.

>Jesus stopped Gnosticism
Hmmmmmm.....

That's like saying Jews were a respected minority in Medieval Europe. Nothing naive about saying it sucks to be occasionally pogrom'd and routinely discriminated.

Kurt Rudolph's "Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism".

Oh, someone mentioned it already:

Manicheans manage to be considered heretics by Christians, Zoroastrians, Muslims, Buddhists and Confucians LMAO.

funny how despite being serviceable parallels to gnosticism I don't think a single person is aware of the connection.