Satan discussion

[CraigD]

I had never heard of the Aquarian Gospel nor demiurgism.

I doubt I’d have heard of The Aquarian Gospel if I hadn’t fallen in with a huge pack of hippies and new age mystics in the mid 1980s. Even among them, it was a pretty obscure church. The only self-described minister of it I knew himself knew of no other minister of it, and, oddly appropriately, knew almost nothing about theosophy. It seems to have gotten a bit more popular since then – I see from it’s wikipedia article (and it has a wikipedia article) that an Aquarian Gospel church – the Aquarian Cristine Church Universal – was incorporated in 2006.

 

Then I wrote “demiurgism” in my previous post as an improvement on the more common “gnosticism”, I believed I was inventing it, though a quick check of ye olde internet cured me of that conceit.

 

I had heard of the Pythegorians from whom Plato seemed to base many of his ideas. These early religions all appear to diverge on some key points. I believe they were much closer to the Bible and Apocrypha than present Christianity.

Yeah, the grand history of ideas passes pretty heavily through the Greeks, and Greek philosophy so heavily influenced the Gospels that Socrates (who taught Plato who taught Aristotle) is commonly called “the first Christian” by theologians. The influence of the Old Testament (better called, I think, the Tanakh, as “Old Testament” more properly refers to translations into current languages of these Hebrew documents), and earlier works that influenced the earliest works of the Tanakh, such as really old Sumerian Cosmogonies, on the Greeks, is more subtle, and less well known (at least in the sense that while I was taught the Greek-Gospel connection, but not the Sumerian-Tanakh, in school).

 

Here’s my own take (almost certainly others have reached similar conclusions, but I’ve not read or heard them) on a key thread in this grand history of ideas:

 

A key feature of Sumerian myth is that the world is underlain by an infinite, formless/chaotic sea (abzu/engur/Nammu/Tiamut), an essentially feminine entity, from which the earth and air was wrest by an act of authority, by an essentially masculine entity (Enki/Marduk/ possiblu Kingu). Although the solid world is dependent on this subterranean water for its vitality, it is at constant risk of being consumed and returned to chaos by it, preserved only by imposed law/order/hierarchy.

 

This is paralleled by the early Greek mythology of the vast, lawless Titan gods, killed or enslaved by lawful, authoritarian Olympic gods. The beginning of the Greek philosophical tradition involved a rejection of this order-over-chaos cosmology, a rejection of the necessity of authoritarian rule (by deities or humans), and an affection for a vast, not formless, but inclusive of all possible form, non-solid essence, which would in time and with the growth of math, geometry, logic, etc (Pythagoras an the early pythagorians were much into this), become Platonic formalism/idealism.

 

This rejection was continued in messianic Jewish writing (the last 19 or the 24 books of the Tanakh), and later, the Christian Gospels, which are, in essence, incitements to reject hierarchal authority in favor of closeness with the primordial, and Gnostic depictions of the masking/perversion of the primordial by the demiurge with the inferior, imitation reality of the physical.

 

This thread – the primacy of chaos, its subjugation by order, then the Gnostic revelation of the primacy of chaos – seems to me to repeat many times on many scales of time, from personal ones of years or decades to historic ones of centuries, and of population size, from individuals to nations and cultures.

[dduckwessel]

You might read that meaning into the Bible, dduck, but the Bible was purposefully written, per the Council of Nicaea I mention above and similar ecumenical councils before and since, expressly to exclude this interpretation.

 

 

CraigD you make it sound as if the Bible didn't exist before the Council of Nicaea, whereas the writings (especially O.T./Written Torah) had been around for some time. They were merely put into an acceptable format (Canon Law) during those councils and the Apocrypha was rejected.

 

As for that council and later ecumenical ones, Jesus would have rejected the whole bunch of them and called them hypocrites like he did the Pharisees. In the Book of Revelation all such groups, churches, denominations, councils are called the 'Whore of Babylon'. It was 'false teachings' based on the understandings 'of men' that Jesus rebuked.

[dduckwessel]

This has to be some of the most outrageous interesting assertions i have ever read, I look forward to explanation of these things. I am familiar with the bible and I have never seen anything close to what you claim but i am willing to learn if you can show me where it says this.

 

Quite possibly you should start a new thread about this?

 

 

Sorry, I've been too busy to respond.

 

I'm not sure where you want me to start.

 

 

Bible verses clearly state that Satan and not God, rules here:

 

How you are fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how you are cut down to the ground. (Isaiah 14:12 - the ground means 'the earth') Lucifer was cast to the earth.

 

In whom the god of this world has blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them. (2 Cor. 2:4)

 

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. (Eph. 6:12)

 

Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence. (John 18:36)

 

Hereafter I will not talk much with you: for the prince of this world comes. (John 14:30)

 

It was actually science that gave me the idea that this world is not what it appears as some quantum physicists argue for the possibility of parallel universes. I began to think that if Satan is the 'god' of this world and his nature is deception, then it's very probable that we are not what we appear.