tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1527840491496268397.post8800956466967055040..comments2024-03-08T11:20:30.095-07:00Comments on Credit Bubble Stocks: June 17th LinksUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1527840491496268397.post-12384356961426268522019-06-19T17:38:44.989-07:002019-06-19T17:38:44.989-07:00For many Gnostic writers, the New Testament was mu...For many Gnostic writers, the New Testament was much too accommodating and failed to acknowledge that the world is evil to the core, that nothing in this life has any redeeming features. Influenced by Plato’s ideas about a remote supreme God who allowed a lesser god, the Demiurge, to create the world, some Gnostic writers spun out extremely dualistic accounts of the universe. <br /><br />To summarize these views, the best source to consult is The Secret Book According to John (or The Apocryphon of John). Because it is a complete document dating from around the fourth century, no one can dismiss it as a biased summary written by the conventional Christian enemies of Gnosticism. Finally, to the extent that there is a core Gnostic work, this is it--Michel Tardieu has called it “the gnostic Bible par excellence.”<br /><br />The manuscript identifies its author as the Apostle John, based on a postresurrection appearance by Christ, who instructed John about “the mysteries which are hidden in silence.” The revelation begins with the supreme mystery, the nature of God, who is identified as the “invisible spirit,” so “superior to deity” that it “is not fitting to think of it as divine.” Eventually, when God thought about his own perfection, that resulted in the existence of an independent entity known as First Thought, or Barbelo. Barbelo also is the Mother and hence the consort of God the Father, and this resulted in a self-generated Child. This trinity then produced a whole entourage of divine entities known as “aeons.” <br /><br />For some immense time all went well: “[T]he scene portrayed in this divine realm is one of complete order, peace, and reverence.” But the calm didn’t last. One of the divine entities went bad—the one named Wisdom. Without permission from God, Wisdom did her own creative imagining, bringing forth a child. It was a grotesque monster: “serpentine, with a lion’s face, and with its eyes gleaming like flashes of lightning.” To hide her folly, Wisdom “surrounded it with a luminous cloud.And she put a throne in the midst of the cloud, so that no being might see it except for the holy spirit... and she called its name Ialtabaoth.” <br /><br />Now things get interesting. Ialtabaoth doesn’t merely look like a monster; he is one. “Completely self-willed, he steals spiritual power from his mother and runs off and sets about creating a world he can control as he pleases.” He is none other than the God of Genesis, who creates “a gang of angelic henchmen, rulers (“archons”) who are to help him control the realm of darkness, and he goes about setting up his rule in the classic style of a petty tyrant,” as Michael Williams so aptly summarized.<br /><br />Having created the earth and given it inhabitants, Ialtabaoth began to assert, “For my part, I am a jealous God. And there is no other god apart from me.” The book now relates a revised version of the whole Adam and Eve, Garden of Eden saga. Once having thrown Adam and Eve out of the Garden, Ialtabaoth instilled a desire for sexual intercourse in humans and then seduced Eve to produce Cain and Abel, the former with the face of a bear, the latter with that of a cat. Adam then fathered Seth, who, unlike Cain and Abel, possessed the spirit of God. Seth and his descendents were regarded as an affront by Ialtabaoth and his henchmen, so he tried to kill them all with the flood. Having been thwarted by Noah, next Ialtabaoth sent evil angels disguised as men; they took women for their brides and generated a polluted humankind. <br /><br />At this point the secret book offers a “poem of deliverance,” wherein Jesus explains that he came to free humanity from the chains of Ialtabaoth. However, Jesus does not end his revelations by encouraging John to go forth and convert the world. Not at all: “For my part, I have told you all things, so that you might write them down and transmit them secretly to those who are like you in spirit.”Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com