Is this reality false and made by something that isn't God but thinks he is God? Can we come to know the Good? If we can know about God through the Bible, does that mean the Bible is more real than our own world? Or was the Bible written by an entity that is not God? If material reality is fake, then what are we? Souls floating in the aether flux?
>>18347704If there was some good God who made everything then this bad false god couldn’t have made this place. The problem is you view things like a child. You say a thing is good if it pleases you and bad if it causes you to suffer. Those two levers dictate what you think ought to be. And yet what if the world is good? We are just evil. What if evolution is a mercy aimed at creating a form of life that is strong and free from suffering?
>>18347708What do "good" and "bad" precisely mean to you?
>>18347704Gnosticism is as attractive as any conspiracy theory, but we usually leave those as a last resort. There is more to be learned from grappling with this material reality than there is from denouncing it and its creator. We can come to know God the same way we can come to know anything else - through ourselves. You don't see red. You have particular cells in your body that respond to red and that's what you see. Similarly, you have a soul that responds to God, and that's how you can know him. At least that's what I understand so far.The Bible is one of the tools to know God, it bears a testimony to his relationship with us, but I don't know that it's more real than our world. Our world bears the testimony just as well. In the end all propositions are just pointers, they never 'contain' truth and so can never be 'more' real than reality. What "real" and "fake" mean changes context to context, money is real when released by a government, but it is all fake nonetheless. Real and fake are just indicators of how easy something is to ignore and think away. God is definitely more real than the things you see around yourself, but that doesn't make them fake.
Dont listen to this guy. >>18347708>You say a thing is good if it pleases you and bad if it causes you to suffer.This is what an abusive cult leader does. They try to desensitize you to their abuse by defining good and bad for you. They tell you that it might "feel" bad as they rape you. They tell you that you just dont understand, and that their abuse of you is really for the best.Bullshit. We are all Sons of the Most High. We can judge the fruit for ourselves.
>>18347704Firstly, I would say it's basically beyond question that we can know the Good. Unless you've had an especially confused and traumatic life, I don't know how you could doubt that. That isn't to say knowing the Good necessarily comes easy, especially in modernity, but if one commits to it then it's certainly attainable.It isn't that material reality is fake, just that it's only a very shallow and outermost reflection of reality-in-itself. We perceive material reality the way we do because of the limitations of our senses.The question, therefore, is why are we limited to such a narrow perceptual field? I don't have a satisfactory answer, but I'm open to both naturalistic explanations (evolution, etc) and more speculative theories, meddling from higher orders, etc.But regardless, as long as we have the capacity to know the Good, which we do, all is not lost.
>>18348141>uses hebraic cult languageholy shit
To whatever validity Gnosticism has, it is rather convenient all sides misrepresent it and also at the same time condemn it. As to why, well no side seems to wish to clarify. Makes all sides untrustworthy to me. Why should I put faith in any that did not seek to put an end to injustice immediately when it first emerged? Speaks to a lack of any and all spirit and deity, and to the material too in kind.
>>18348003If it is useful to me in some way, it is good. I would even argue that in an abstract sense that what is good is what is useful. Useful can even mean entertaining or pleasing. Bad describes all those things which are useless and displeasing. So, being a good citizen is different from being a good ruler, for example. I think Socrates' definition of arete is probably the best example of this way of thinking.>>18348312Not really. It just means that you believe human justice is cosmic justice. We seem to have pretty clear laws of nature. If humans want to live and live well, then they have to learn and follow these laws, and to cooperate with one another. It doesn't fix the problem of natural evil, but I do not really see the issue here.
>>18347708We are evil because, because a book says!
>>18348336Being weak is evil, and all evil comes from weakness.
Abrahagroids pretend a "religion" based on doing what feels spiritually intuitive, and jotting together a gospel from your gnosis is less intellectual than believing a fucking rando bookThe first is scientific thought, the second mindless cultist behaviour but somehow it's a conspiracy>>18348344So goodness is robbing and killing and raping because police will be after your ass, gotcha
>>18348348All of those crimes stem from some inherent weakness or limitation.
>>18348349No, you gotta be strong to face police and army, only the weak obey
