I was raised in a fairly conservative, Christian family of the Protestant variety. I suppose the thing which bothered me the most about what I learned during that period was the exclusiveness of this religion as it was taught to me. It didn't seem to make sense that a loving God would only allow you to be saved if you believed that Jesus was his son. What, I thought, of all the people who never heard of Jesus or were taught to believe something different? Were they going to be eternally damned even if they were basically good people? And, I wondered, if you had to believe in Jesus, how were people in the Old Testament saved?
The Old Testament, itself, was a problem for me. When God turned Lot's wife into a pillar of salt for looking at the cities of Soddom and Gomorrah (which he had just destroyed by fire),[1] hardened the heart of Pharoh so that he would refuse the supplication of Moses to release the Jews,[2] flooded the world,[3] commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac,[4] and permitted Satan to do whatever he wanted to Job (except kill him),[5] I had a hard time believing this was a loving God. And when God said he was “jealous” and that humans were to have “no God before him,”[6] I thought, a true deity wouldn't care if s/he was worshipped.
The “fall” in the Old Testament is a real exercise in contradictions. How is it that Adam and Eve are thown out of the Garden of Eden because they dared to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? After all, aren't we, as humans, supposed to know the difference between right and wrong? Why would God want to keep us ignorant? And why punish someone for gaining knowledge?
Carlin Vignette
“Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed. Results like these do not belong on the résumé of a Supreme Being. This is the kind of shit you’d expect from an office temp with a bad attitude. And just between you and me, in any decently-run universe, this guy would’ve been out on his all-powerful ass a long time ago. And by the way, I say “this guy”, because I firmly believe, looking at these results, that if there is a God, it has to be a man.
No woman could or would ever fuck things up like this. So, if there is a God, I think most reasonable people might agree that he’s at least incompetent, and maybe, just maybe, doesn’t give a shit. Doesn’t give a shit, which I admire in a person, and which would explain a lot of these bad results.”
Against this backdrop, I came across the Sethian version of Gnostic Christianity which posits that the God of the Old Testament is not really “God,” but, instead, is a lesser deity which would like to have humans believe he is the only god. This “deity” is referred to as the Demiurge and is credited with (a) creating the world with all its faults and (b) doing his best to insure that we humans do not recognize the spark of the divine which is within each one of us and keeping us from connecting with the ultimate, true God.
The Gnostic model clears up a lot of things for me which don't make sense in the Orthodox Christian model, such as:
Adam and Eve were cast out of the garden not because they did something wrong, but because they did something right: they ate from the tree of knowledge which took them one step closer to connecting with God, something which infuriated the Demiurge who forced their explusion from “paradise.” (“Paradise” is shown in quotes because, as with everything created by the Demiurge, it was not a “utopia,” but instead, was a ruse to insure the separation of humans from the Divine.)
The “fall” in Orthodox Christianity is defined as the original sin against God – meaning we are all inherently imperfect. The “fall,” however, should be characterized as the “separation” which recognizes that what causes us to sin is not inherent in our true selves, but, instead is caused by our egos and other creations of this world keeping our inner divinity separate from the Godhead.
Orthodox believers get themselves in a real mess when they posit that the one, true god created everything. Since god is perfect, then his creation must be perfect and this leaves Orhtodoxy at a loss for explaining earthquakes, floods, droughts, plagues, etc. Orthodoxy extracts itself from this contradiction by believing that these apparently “bad” things must be part of a “divine plan” which we humans are too limited to understand.
The Gnostics, however, would say that these bad things occur because the world is not perfect (owing to its creation by an imperfect deity, the Demiurge). Gnostics would further argue that all of this nonsense about the world being perfect and there being a divine plan is nothing more than attempts to keep us from connecting with the Godhead.
You are not saved by “believing” in Jesus or God or some creed, but, instead, are saved by “knowing” the God within you and connecting this to the Pleroma. (By the way, I'm using terms such as “one, true God” and “Godhead” and “Pleroma” interchangeably.)
The mission of Jesus – as with Buddha and many other people – was to teach us to become like him and, thereby, become sons of God ourselves. In other words, everyone is capable of becoming “Jesus” (or Buddha), but the Demiurge's creation makes it incredibly difficult to accomplish.
Probably the biggest benefit of Gnosticism is that it does not require one to believe a certain thing in order to be saved. Those traditions which make non-belief a "sin" do not have to go very far to see those of different faiths as potential influences which could get in the way of being saved. Taken a few steps further, it becomes necessary to force other faiths to adopt your belief or, if that is not workable, kill them.
Here's a list of some of the books I read on my way to becoming a Gnostic Christian, although not all of them are exactly Gnostic, when combined with the other texts in the list, they pointed me in the general direction of Gnostic Christianity:
The Gnostic World View: A Brief Summary of Gnosticism by Stephan Hoeller (Tau Stephanus, Gnostic Bishop) http://www.gnosis.org/gnintro.htm
The Noble Eightfold Path of Christ: Jesus Teaches the Dharma of Buddhism by Thomas Ragland. Obtainable from Amazon.
The Gospel of Thomas by David F. Capps. Obtainable from MemoWare or from Amazon
A Gnostic Catechism by Stephan A. Hoeller. This document is downloadable from the web site of the Ecclesia Gnostica.
Living Gnosticism by Jordan Stratford. Obtainable from Smashwords or Amazon.
The Life Beyond Death by William W. Atkinson and Yogi Ramacharaka. Obtainable from Amazon.
The Kybalion: A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece by The Three Initiates. Obtainable from Amazon or Project Gutenberg.
Footnotes
[1]Genesis 19:26 - "But Lot’s wife looked back, and she became a pillar of....."
[2]Exodus 7:3 - "Then the LORD said to Moses, “See, I have made you like God to Pharaoh, and your brother Aaron will be your prophet. You are to say everything I...."
[3] Genesis 6:5 - "When human beings began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the..."
[4] Genesis 22:2 - "Then God said, 'Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a...'"
[5] Job 1:6-12 - "In the land of Uz there lived a man whose name was Job. This man was blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil. He had seven..."
[6]Exodus 20:5 - "Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God..."