(urth) Appearances of Inire

[António Pedro Marques]

António Pedro Marques wrote:
> John Watkins wrote:
>>
>>
>> 2010/7/1 António Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com
>> <mailto:entonio at gmail.com>>
>>
>> John Watkins wrote (01-07-2010 19:09):
>>
>> 2010/7/1 António Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com
>> <mailto:entonio at gmail.com>
>> John Watkins wrote (01-07-2010 18:22):
>>
>> A universe under the dominion of an evil being that poses and is
>> seen as doing God's will is consistent with the existence of a
>> benign God?
>>
>> It's the premise of Gnosticism, isn't it? And arguably of
>> Christianity,
>> just on a grander scale.
>>
>>
>> Could you elaborate?
>>
>> Yes. Gnosticism posits that "the world" is the creation of the
>> demiurge, a debased being posing as the true God, but that a benign God
>> still exists and calls for our loyalty. Gnostic Christianity (or
>> Gnosticism proper) posits that Jesus Christ was a sort of messenger from
>> the true God, preaching a rejection of the demiurge. Orthodox
>> Christianity refers at times to the Devil as "the lord of [the/this]
>> world," with much the same significance.
>
> But what they consider is that the demiurge is antagonistic to God. They
> do not consider the demiurge to be God, and those who they see
> worshipping God are not worshipping what they consider as the demiurge.
> So I think the parallel fails.

I mean, it's not the parallel between BNS and gnostic christianity that 
fails, it's the parallel to a BNS in which an evil Tazdkiel had wide moral 
control over mankind, such that those who opposed him were of dubious moral 
stature, that does. For such is the option offered by 2 - it hypothesizes 
that Tzadkiel is evil (let's not go to Machen's The White People's 
prologue), but it doesn't remove the fact that those who serve and revere 
him tend to be good, whereas those who oppose him tend a bit to the thug 
side - at least if I remember the text (put aside the ones who were merely 
fighting for their lives).