GnosticBishop wrote:
Did you have an opinion on the moral position of the O.P.?
I'd have to give it four levels of analysis.
Ground level - people believing BS. Best to make well-articulated points about parts of their books that are anti-human, how they don't serve the best interest of society today, and most importantly how badly those books contradict themselves - to the point where the deity is just to inconsistent to even be real. No matter what the story is above, humanism is our best attempt at harmony and it's best to steer these people at some form of it whether secular or mystical.
Next level up - egregores. You can try reasoning with people, however if you attack a group sharply enough to arouse attention you'll get the egregore, trying to survive, twisting the subconscious of people in that group to come after you and sometimes as well there'd be plenty of priests, clerics, or whatever declaring you one of their key enemies. Your odds of tangling with such a thing and winning on your own are quite low. Even lower are your odds of actually tripping such a response by yourself. Rather than taking the thing by violence its better to, as in the case of the above, just reason with the believers until they either drop it or the whole thing goes Episcopalian in flavor.
Third level up - actual gods/goddesses. Most people don't know them directly. Most people who they're working with or who their agency is being worked through don't know that its them unless they run into some type of emergency in life (small dream interactions or odd moments in life start to make sense). There isn't a way in at them. If you do declare them enemies and that they must be destroyed they know you have no way in at them, that they have thousands of ways in at you (which they're unlikely to use anything more than the minimum to adjust your attitude), and if you annoy them enough for them to decide to troll you that's a rough spot in that life will likely get very strange and you'll realize just how powerless you are in the face of them.
Top level - what you might call the blazing star, the central I AM, who I think most people wave their fists at when they think they're waving them at Allah, Yahweh, etc. and which is much closer in content and composure to Plotinus's 'The Good' but which, TBH, is the composer of all things. No way in at it, it may well be all of conscious being so you'd be attempting to unravel that, and it simply won't fight you. It might hug-bomb you when you're dead and find yourself before it, that's about it.
I know from past interactions on these topics that you seem to buy into materialism/physicalism, or at least you blur the lines between 'these things are evil' and 'these things can't exist' and using Gnosticism as a metaphor the way a LaVeyan would use Satan as an atheist, it's a point you might want to research more and at least consider some possibility of agnosticism on. The body of evidence that we live in a conscious universe or at least much more conscious in its composition that we've believed under physicalism seems to be growing, not retracting, and by this point - after 20 or 30 years of NDE's and the like and now for the past 10 magicians having big channels on Youtube about their work with grimoires, the shem ha mephorash, etc. sunlight should have absolutely killed all of this if it was silly superstition or - at a minimum - killed funding for groups like the doctors at the University of Virginia who have authors running around talking to people with NDE's, interviewing children with past life memories, and rather than 2008's Irreducible Mind being a flop they've just written a follow-up. Add to that a lot of mainstream scientists and philosophers embracing some variant of panpsychism - it's because eliminative materialism tells us we're not having this conversation (we just think we are) and strong emergence tells us that neurons, and only neurons, are magick. We're moving toward a new paradigm, we may move several before we get it right, but it's looking increasingly more obvious those paradigms will sequentially move away from reductive materialism as an ontology and just leave it to be what it's best at - a way of analyzing strictly physical aspects of phenomena.
Point being - we know human human ignorance, we have ideas on how to deal with human ignorance that don't cause them to double-down in the wrong direction (polite persuasion being the key on not having the later happen), when ignorance meets stupidity it gets more complicated because they're also vibrantly sure of themselves or simply can't hand their minds over to someone else to mold unless the environment so radically changes that it's the only safe way to go. For the actual 'divine' we have no clue. Plenty of reason to believe that at least something approximating what we'd call angels, gods, goddesses, etc. exist although we've never had a clue what they were and our definitions tend to be very vague, theological, etc. and we won't be able to say much on them until we consider them natural phenomena. As for the All - I try not to think about it most days anymore. It was morally easier to be an atheist and believe that this all evolved by chance (physical and otherwise), if it wasn't - or worse, was knowingly built by a theistic deity - I'd say there are just too many knives to dig at my soul and too few answers. My hope is that it evolved with us and allows this because it had no power over it (being a product of it rather than its creator) but that could be wishful thinking.
_________________
The loneliest part of life: it's not just that no one is on your cloud, few can even see your cloud.
08 Aug 2018, 11:33 am
