Pc And Gnosticism

[mgf50]

I regard Marcus Borg is a Progessive Christians. He points out the important role of myth and imagination in Christianity, Marcus Borg says in the Heart of Christianity

 

'"The emerging parqadigm sees the Bible metaphorically, by which I mean 'it more- then-literal,' 'more-than-factual,' meaning. It is not so concerned with the hist9orical factuality of the Bible srtories, but much moree with their meaning, It is not botheed by the posibility that the stories of Jesus birth and resurrection are metaphorical rather then literal and factual accounts. Itt asks 'Whether it happened this way or not, what is the story saying? What meaning does it have for us.'" (pg.13-14)

 

I was amazed to discover that seeing the Bible metaphorically rather then as historical fact, is not new or modern. The gnostics wrote theiir own gospels which were novels or tales which told how we we all 'sons of God.' and how should find the Christ in our lives. For example the author of the Gospel of Philip says 'Truth did not come into the world naked, but it comes in types and images. One will not receive truth in any other way.'

 

Modern Western culture downplays the importance of dereams, visions, and myths in our lives. This was not true of the early Christians, especially the Gnostics, who believed that dreams,visions and myths gave us a direct experience of God. We lost this when we dogmatized Christianity.

[Gnosteric]

Hi mgf50, I agree with you on all counts. It has puzzled me that more PCs haven't made the leap to Gnosticism. It must be all the bad press that we have gotten from the more orthodox folks. IMO, when Gnostic texts are "literalized" that is when people become frightened off. I guess the thought of God raping Eve raises some eybrows.

 

I think Borg actually helped me find Gnosticism. In one of his earlier books doesn't he speak of Sophia...... and also identifies Jesus as a "Spirit Person" who knows (as in gnosis?) how to spot the thin boundary areas between this world and the Spirit world? If that's Borg, then that's one of the books that helped lead me to Gnosticism.

 

I think that you are on to something here.

[Bobd]

Gnosteric and MGF50:

 

If you look at the Hebrew writing of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the words are all run together and there are no extensions assigned to the letters so they can be pronounced. The extensions assigned to Hebrew letters, for those who are not familiar with it, are the vowels that are added so you can pronounce the words. Since the Dead Sea Scrolls had no vowels, it could not be read aloud. The only way it could be understood is symbolically. Whoever understood the symbolic meaning of the letters could understand what the text said. When you understand the symbolism; grammar, punctuation, and individual words are not a necessary part of the language. That is why there is no punctuation, words or vowels in the Dead Sea Scrolls. It also means that very few people understood the meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls. As time went on the ancient Jewish scribes invented the Masoretic texts by adding vowels in the form of extensions, and separating the groups of symbols into words so that the text could be read aloud to people who could not understand it. This gradual transformation from the symbolic meaning to the literal meaning during the 2nd to the 11th centuries in the current era, a time of great ignorance among mankind, resulted in a substantial distortion of the meanings of many Hebrew words. Fortunately, the Hebrew symbols themselves, have been preserved, thanks to our Jewish friends, in almost perfect condition. This means that it is possible to get back to the original symbolic meaning of each letter. When you know the symbolic meaning of each letter, you can decipher the meanings of the words.

 

I have been able to unlock a few and here is a sample.

 

Yod is the symbol for the phallus or the male reproductive ability

 

Ha is the symbol for the definite article.

 

Ayin is the symbol for the area around pituitary gland or the third eye representing our "sixth sense" abilities.

 

Lamed is the symbol for the Serpent and the uterus. The Serpent in turn is the symbol for DNA. Since the DNA from the phallus gets together frequently with the uterus it results in repeated replication. Therefore Lamed means to replicate repeatedly. It is the process by which animal life is perpetually sustained on earth.

 

If you know of anyone who has produced a book on the symbolic meanings of the Hebrew letters, I would certainly love to hear about it. In the meantime I will be studying Genesis in Hebrew to try to pick up what I can. In any event, the work I have done so far produces a very different interpretation of Biblical scripture than what is produced by organized religion. I am finding out that much of Old Testament is chocked full of Gnostic ideas which have been buried by those Jews who prefer to take the literalist approach and more recently by the evangelists. For example, the Book of Job speaks openly about reincarnation and the One Consciousness of mankind. It talks about the power and the Gnosis of this One Consciousness and how it affects mankind. All of this has been buried partly because 3 Hebrew words have been translated as ‘God’ instead of what they actually mean. As a result of idolizing Biblical scriptures as the Word of God, the evangelical version of the Book of Job became a highly distorted version of what the original author actually wrote. This is true for the Pentateuch and possibly other Biblical books that I haven’t even had a chance to look at.

 

What I have seen so far leads me to the theory that in the time that Jesus walked the earth, there was little or no difference between Gnosticism and early Christianity.

 

BobD

[flowperson]

Yes Bobd.

 

I came to many of the same conclusions that you did here, only about 15 years ago. I was spiritually, but soundly, beaten about the head and shoulders for my blasphemous beliefs and worse yet, the audacity to write essays about it. As Yogi once may have said, "I tink it's dat day javue thing all over again !"

 

I'm still wondering who it was who did all that ?

 

flow....

[Bobd]

Yes Bobd.

 

I came to many of the same conclusions that you did here, only about 15 years ago. I was spiritually, but soundly, beaten about the head and shoulders for my blasphemous beliefs and worse yet, the audacity to write essays about it. As Yogi once may have said, "I tink it's dat day javue thing all over again !"

 

I'm still wondering who it was who did all that ?

 

flow....

 

Flow;

 

When you introduced these conclusions, you became a heretic among the believers.

 

Practicing heresy is a very dangerous business. Over the centuries heretics have been jailed, ridiculed, excommunicated, anathematized, murdered, hung on the cross, burned at the stake and tortured for expressing their views. Why is it that heretics tend to be persecuted for their ideas? Strangely, the answer came to me while I was watching a television program produced by the Fox network called Nanny 911. The mother in this episode was using this little rubber device with a rather large teat on one side and a ring on the other to pacify her three year old son. She would give it to him whenever he felt insecure and when he went to bed. The nanny felt that the child was too old to be still sucking on a pacifier and insisted that it be withdrawn. The kid did not take too kindly to having it removed. He went into a tantrum of screaming and crying and pounding and kicking and demanding his pacifier, which lasted well into the night. For many people, religion serves as a spiritual pacifier to allay their feelings of insecurity. They feel comfortable sucking on the image of god as revealed by their church and its associated dogma, and as part of that church, they feel cared for and spiritually protected by this god. When a heretic comes along and upsets or dispels that image of god, they revert back to their child-like emotions and become very angry. They lash out at the heretic calling him or her an idiot or even worse and begin to fantasize ways to persecute him or her.

 

People tend to idolize the image of god that has been fed to them from their childhood days and if you upset that image with ideas that are "foreign" to them, you are in danger of being persecuted. You can see this happening daily in the fundamentalist Islamic world.

 

BobD