To acknowledge that the ways of other people are true for them as our ways are true for us can be a dangerous path to follow. It is not sufficient to acknowledge that other ways are true when they hold people in bondage, promote hatred, and wave flags of superiority pertaining to their ways as opposed to ours. There is only one god Me, the collective consciousness of all of us.

We need a reason to take up the cross and follow [b]Me[/b] and that reason is to bring peace and harmony. The world today is in chaos and it is getting worse. Starvation is here now and environmental collapse is about to strike. Chaos reins supreme on mother earth. It is fine for the few of us who have money. But for the rest of us that make up two thirds of the world’s population, it is starvation, chaos and misery. If we are to survive as a human race, we must have harmony. That means that all all human beings must have healthy food for the body and healthy food for the mind.

The original cross of the Christians was the Coptic cross which is a perfect circle perched on a bar with another bar of equal length dropping straight down from the centre of the horizontal bar. The circle represents the circle of everlasting life and the horizontal bar is [b]Me[/b] lying on My side to support everlasting life and the vertical bar is Me standing up to create everlasting life. Jesus knew that there is no death. “Let the dead bury their own dead”, he says. The Coptic cross represents the cross of the original Christians for the first 3 centuries until the Fourth century. That was when Ialdabaoth distorted the cross and made it a cross of martyrdom in his egoist quest for power and control of the credulous masses.

The circle of life is depicted in a rainbow. A rainbow, when it is not broken by the horizon of the earth, forms a perfect circle. What you see in a rainbow is not the whole rainbow. It is but a tiny part of it. There are ultra violet rays and infrared rays that cannot be seen with the naked eye. There are also gamma rays, X-rays and radio waves that are all part of the rainbow of light waves that we cannot see. That is the way people are. The body is the only part we can see and is but a tiny part of the whole of a human being. In addition to the body, we have a spirit, a soul and a consciousness and we never die. The bow in the sky in Genesis is a symbol of man as a being of everlasting life. It signifies that no one died in the flood; they merely became spirit, awaiting the renewal of the earth to return and experience more of what it has to offer. Noah provided the seed of life that brings back repeatedly the billions of souls that perished in the flood.

The cross of martyrdom is the cross of satan the adversary. Satan is the transliterated Hebrew word meaning ‘the adversary’. That is the way it is translated in the Tanakh. Satan is not a spirit. It is an attitude. When you present yourself as a martyr, you present yourself as one who has adversaries and therefore become an adversary of those who you believe to be your adversaries. Creating a martyr to be worshiped as a god is warped wisdom as the born again Christian President George W. Bush is finding out. He has martyred over 2000 American soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi solders leaving behind widows and orphans to grieve and to suffer financially from the lack of a father to produce income for their survival. Martyrdom produces adversity and brings chaos. It is the way of Ialdabaoth. The cross of martyrdom is the cross of warped wisdom. The cross of eternal life is the cross that Jesus taught us to take up when he invited us to follow Me. This brings us to the how as we address point 3.

Perhaps you meant to say that the early cross of the Gnostics was the pre-Christian Coptic cross, or ankh. (I in no way mean to offend modern Coptic Christians with this comment, which is aimed solely at a long ago symbol of ancient Egyptian mystery schools whose adherents believed in a titanic battle between the forces of light and darkness, and whose modern-day descendants still believe in this imaginary battle.)

Bobd -- for a fellow who tells us that Satan is not a spirit but an attitude, your Ialdaboath sounds oddly like . . . hmmm . . . well, like Satan! Or Darth Vader! Or Sauron! A real, conscious force within the collective unconscious of humankind who acts on behalf of the forces of darkness!

You talk about bringing peace and harmony. What about specifics? What are you day-to-day goals for bringing about said peace and harmony? What is your 5-year plan for improving public education in your community? What are you doing today (not in the year 2012, but today) to improve access to publicly funded medical care in your community? How have you helped God today?

God the Mother, God the Father, and God the choir of angels (to which you belong) have excellent memories, and they really aren't interested in what symbols were used by ancient mystery schools. Nor are they moved by cliches. Cliches don't make the world a better place. Teamwork, patience, planning, and education make the world a better place.

Thank you, Mother and Father, for the many blessings you share with us all.
Love Jesus
December 23, 2006

Canajan, eh?

The Ankh cross in no way symbolizes the battle of light and darkness. It is the symbol of everlasting life. The Ankh combines two symbols, the cross (life) and the circle (eternity), thus together they represent immortality. The loop of the ankh is considered to be the feminine, while the T shape is considered to be the masculine. These two figures then come together and form life and reflect a continued existence.

The Coptic cross or Gnostic cross which appears in the Gospel of Judas, is also the symbol of everlasting life and is the one I described. It is somewhat different from the Ankh cross in that it has a perfect circle to represent the rainbow and depicts the immortality of the spirit or the soul.

Concerning Yaldabaoth (also spelled Ialdabaoth) and Satan, here is how they work together.

First the definitions:

Yaldabaoth – warped wisdom. This warped wisdom is derived from the egos of men and sometimes women in their coveting of power.

Satan – the adversary or the opponent. This is the definition given to it in the Jewish Tanakh

Yaldabaoth and Satan work together in this way as shown in the example below.

Step 1
Yaldabaoth creates a piece of scripture called the temptation of Jesus and warps the meaning of Satan by changing it from an adversary to the devil or an evil spirit.

Step 2
Yaldabaoth creates a beautiful golden calf called the trinity to be worshiped by the credulous and illiterate masses who believe that this golden calf is really god.

Step 3
Yaldabaoth makes himself the emissary of this god and forms a powerful Church.

Step 4
Yaldabaoth starts demonizing Gnostics, Jews, Moslems and other ways of thinking about god by claiming that they are aligned with this evil Satan. They can do this because in their self righteous thinking, they are aligned with this good golden calf called the trinity with Jesus at its head, and are working in a war against the evil Satan

Step 5
Yaldaboath commits adversarial acts in the name of this god such as writing tractates against these other ways of thinking, the crusades, the inquisition, burning people at the stake, witch hunting, erasing the history of the Gnostic cross and telling BobD that he should take his ideas to some other web site.

As far as specifics go, concerning peace and harmony, they have nothing to do with point 2. I am currently working in a few ideas and I will be posting them in point 3. Thank you for the invitation.

Your dogmatic literalist mind misunderstands the meaning of god the mother, god the father and god the choir of angels. These are symbols representing the uniting of the male and the female to replicate life on earth perpetually. You too belong to this process, unless of course you believe you are born of a virgin. The choir of angels is the symbol for the joy we experience in the process of the replication of life – the joy of little children, families and a friendly community - and the joy that we can experience on earth without the influence of Yaldabaoth and Satan.

I agree with you. Teamwork, patience, planning, and education do make this world a better place. I hope you have learned something from the education lesson above. By the way, you failed to include wisdom in this process.

As far as you signing your postings ‘Jesus’, may I suggest that you read the book by the very eminent bible scholar, Bart D. Ehrman, called Misquoting Jesus. Perhaps, then, you can learn to get it right. (I can hurl insults as easily as you can. I do it in the spirit of love and not as your adversary, in order to make a point)

BobD

Partly what the tcpc Point Two says, IMHO, is that we're all on the same level before God. The cross is the Christian example of the way that all faiths must come to terms with suffering.

In the Old Testament, God ordered Moses to hold up a bronze serpent on a pole and show it to the people, as a remedy for snakebites. By recognizing the source of their pain they experienced healing. In the Greek legend of Aescelapius, two snakes twined on a pole became the symbol of medicine. Only when we bring our spiritual wounds to consciousness can we begin to recover health and wholeness. When we look at the cross, we see the truth in Buddha's teaching that all life is suffering but also the beginning of enlightenment.

American culture often denies or depersonalizes suffering as if it were possible to avoid it completely. The cross reminds us that we are always burdened with human nature, causing each other harm. Pain has to be embraced in order to heal.

Anything which we idolize-- success, productivity, instant gratification, appearance, whatever--can become the compulsive rigidity of a cross or false self.

"The cross no longer represents the idea of substitutionary sacrifice, but reminds us of our existential condition: crucified by our grasp for perfection, dying of spiritual thirst from mad efforts to escape our weaknesses. The cross reminds us that ultimately we are not our bodies, our egos, but the crossroad where we turn from our broken mortal selves and grace-fully move toward our divine selves....It holds out its arms for us." [Open Christianity]

Rivanna, your posting resonates with a very profound truth. The Book of Job tells us that the source of harm is from ha Satan (the adversary or the opponent). Ha Satan roams the earth with the sons of the gods and all human beings are the sons (or descendants) of the gods and therefore all human beings carry among themselves the tendency to create adversaries. The New Testament story of the temptation of Jesus has converted ha Satan into Satan the devil - an evil spirit. As a result, ha Satan becomes a scapegoat. Instead of admitting that we all, to some degree or another, do harm to others by hoarding wealth, making war, and creating borders to keep out the riffraff, we gather into groups called countries, big business and right wing religions and idolize our group as the good guys while demonizing the outsiders as unsaved or sinners. "They" are affected by Satan the devil and "we" are not. This tends to perpetuate suffering. That is not the message that the author of Job intended to deliver. Any time that we form a group to further our own interests on the backs of others, we become "the adversary" to these others. This is the message that Job is trying to deliver to us. We have to start expanding our egos to include everyone on earth in our group. One world under god. Jesus had a good idea to get the ball rolling. It is called loving your enemies and praying for those who persecute you or mistreat you. (Matthew 5:43-45 and Luke 6:27-28) It is only when we include every citizen of the earth, no matter how rotten they act, in the circle of love, suffering will begin to abate. Properly organized mass prayers for despotic leaders and avaricious big business might actually work in bringing the citizens of the world into the one body of Christ (The definition of 'Christ' is 'the anointed' and the anointed is one who is anointed with unconditional love). The Circle on the Gnostic cross also symbolizes the circle of love.

BobD,

Thanks. Your interpretations are often thought provoking. I'm not familiar with Gnosticism but I sense that we agree in spirit.

IMHO point 2 is an affirmation that the way Jesus taught and lived was universal and accessible to all. So it was confusing when you began by saying "to acknowledge that the ways of other people are true for them as our ways are true for us can be a dangerous path to follow." It seems you take point 2 as a statement about the danger of blindly accepting the imperialist policies of government (definitely agree, just didn't see the connection at first).

You said, "we need a reason to take up the cross...and that reason is to bring peace and harmony." Then you identified the cross as eternal life, rather than suffering. To me they are not the same---but I agree that seeking martyrdom does no good to anyone. Maybe what you're suggesting is, instead of desperately trying to protect our way of life, we should be looking for ways to change our way of life to cooperate more with the rest of the world (easy to say, hard to do).

To me, the book of Job deals with human vs divine perspectives--about bad things happening to good people--rather than dealing with enemies and war. But your point is so true--demonizing other cultures perpetuates conflict and pain.

In terms of current events--respect and communication with an opponent would go further toward peace, than sending more troops to be killed in someone else's civil war. But articulating these things only makes me/us feel more angry and helpless. Perhaps "taking up a cross of eternal life" suggests it's better for each person to build up whatever wholeness and relationships are at hand--? I don't know.