(urth) Appearances of Inire

John Watkins john.watkins04 at gmail.com
Thu Jul 1 16:07:35 PDT 2010


This is mistaken. The Gnostic posits that the demiurge is in fact the
God of the Old Testament; while it's at least consistent with
Christianity to posit that the gods worshipped by various pagans are
identifiable with devils.

On 7/1/10, António Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com> 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.
>
>> 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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