(urth) Appearances of Inire

John Watkins john.watkins04 at gmail.com
Thu Jul 1 13:28:17 PDT 2010


2010/7/1 António Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com>

> John Watkins wrote (01-07-2010 19:09):
>
>> 2010/7/1 António Pedro Marques <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.

See C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy for a literalization of this kind of
cosmology.  There, Satan is the local ruler--the planetary genius of
Earth--and the true God is the ruler of the universe, from whom Satan
originally had authority in fiefdom, but against whom Satan has rebelled.
Of course, the scale is different from the 2) hypothetical (planet versus
universe), but from the perspective of Earth there's very little different.



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