Gnosticism gets a lot of guff for seeing the material world as something to be escaped from.
I think that’s a caricature of gnosticism. Sure, the Used Car Salesman who created the world set up a lemon of a universe, but that doesn’t mean gnosticism has to be anti-body and anti-earth.
Even if many flavors of gnosticism are quite anti-body and anti-earth, we can put together a gnosticism that isn’t body hating. It’s not like there are gnostic police waiting to take us down for trying.
What would a “good earth gnosticism” look like? Click to continue reading “Good earth gnosticism”
This one’s going to. I suppose it’s a prereq for an MRS degree.
I don’t know how many of you watch HBO’s John From Cincinanti. The long and short of it is that the Second Coming has come to a run down stretch of beach south of San Diego. Instead of Jesus of Nazareth, he’s John from Cincinnati.
A recurring theme is John’s incomprehensibility. He just almost makes sense, except for when he just plain doesn’t. That he only says words and phrases he’s heard someone else say—rearranging them—makes matters all the worse. He also comes off dumber than a bag of hammers, whether he’s talking or not. Click to continue reading “The gnosticism of John from Cincinnati”
Folks with bipolar have been taking some of the same meds as folks with epilepsy for a while now. Might be a coincidence. Might mean they’re two ends of the same thing.
I hear it a lot. I’ve probably said it a lot. “Jesus is a great prophet.” “Great man” works just as well. Or “great teacher.”
But what does it mean? Or, better, what does it mean that’s worth saying?
Sometimes it seems like a brush off. Other times it feels like an honest to god honorific. And then there are the times it gets confused with references to Muhammad.
Are we trying to say anything specific when we say Jesus or Buddha or whoever is a great prophet? Or are we trying to say nothing in particular?
To follow up on my questions for non-Christian UUs, I’m wondering which version of the Christian story you are rejecting. This sort of gets to the post at Philocrites a bit ago that called out how the version of Christianity we say we reject is a good 300 years old.
So what about the version of the story that Jesus is the divine exemplar of God’s love? Or the version of the story where Jesus is God’s way of identifying with human suffering and oppression? Or what about unitarian Christianity? Or universalist Christianity?
Do you reject these stories? Have you considered them? If so, why do you reject them?
