Exclavius wrote:
You shall not dishonor your parents.
---Without infinite regress, he had to have had a maker, (Likely the US he refers to) so.. he ignores them in the book he writes for us? that's dishonour!
Funny you shoud say that...
From
Against Heresies by Irenaeus (yes, he was a Church Father, and normally I'd trust what they said about any other belief system about as far as I could spit a rat, but checking up on the surviving Gnostic books proves that in this case he's being more or less accurate):
"On this account, Ialdabaoth, becoming uplifted in spirit, boasted himself over all those things that were below him, and exclaimed:
I am Father, and God, and above me there is no-one. But his mother, hearing him speak thus, cried out against him:
Do not lie, Ialdabaoth; for the father of all, the first Anthropos, is above you...in order to lead them away and attract them to himself, they affirm that Ialdabaoth exclaimed:
Come, let us make man after our image...
For those not familiar with Gnosticism, the general myth - there were many variations - is that the true God, the unknowable Source (here called the first Anthropos, as in, the being in whose spiritual image humans are truly created), emanated a series of beings of which Sophia was the youngest...she tried to emanate another being herself while still too immature to do so, and ended up creating Ialdabaoth, who's a kind of walking abortion - not exactly evil, but half-formed and a bit dumb about how the universe works. Imagine a vastly powerful two-year-old and you have his personality about right. He creates the material world - or according to some modern commentators, the current system of this world, which is why everything is so screwed up - and he goes on to create humans who, however, can only 'squirm along the ground' like worms until Sophia asks the ultimate God to breathe spiritual life into them. It's Sophia who's here reminding young Ialdabaoth that he's not as powerful as he thinks.
To the Gnostics, Ialdabaoth was the god of the Old Testament. Jesus was the spouse of Sophia who came to show us the way back to the light. Hence the vast moral difference between the two. If you're familiar with the works of William Blake, his 'Old Nobodaddy' is roughly the same creature.
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"Grunge? Isn't that some gross shade of greenish orange?"