Great writing! I love the literary bent on this, so sorry for answering in plainer terms.
I don't think we can say the gnostics are *wrong* about there being a veil... it's a huge veil, and an evolutionary one. Evolution is a blunt designer, blindly optimizing for present reproduction; truth, happiness and long-term concerns can only fall through by near-accident. Our symbolic thinking faculties are so crudely tuned that we're liable to get terrorized by our own random thoughts. We reify our own thought patterns as if they were objective, and then wonder why the world doesn't work like it should. We fall for zero-sum social games all the times. But then the gnostics themselves fall for the veil of paranoia, and reify a mischievous conspirator in chief. That's where they get it wrong, as you yourself say. It's the silly world of Matrix, with its cartoonish villains running the show.
So "seeing behind the curtain" is absolutely needed, because there is a lot to see, and a lot of pressure not to see. Contra your the later part of the article, reaching deep into ourselves, looking for the deeper truths, is very much needed! Indeed your whole article, and so much human intellectual endeavour, and so much of literature, is precisely trying to do that. It's just that the *paranoid* mode of doing that is no longer called for.
Then the mainstream Christian story you contrapose.... isn't that also a conspiracy? A God who conspires to become human in order to redeem humanity is still very much shaped as a conspiracy. It's the story of a God who has a narrative in view, the story of a "good" top-down manipulator who will mess with us humans to bend things towards His purposes. Taken at face value, it devolves into the soothing myth of the adult in charge.
So yes, whatever we want to call it, I agree that we need to come out of paranoid thinking, and finally figure out that *there is no conspiracy*. Neither the villains of Matrix, nor the parochial Good God who bends to our human-shaped sense of the favorable or the good. In naturalist terms, it's an evolutionary, bottom-up story. But if you have a sense of God or spirit, then it means giving God back its transcendent freedom. As you say, wide open for play.
Really, really good. Bravo. A real response requires work/time/energy that I cannot spare at present, but I do want you to know this is very strong indeed, IMAO. Keep it up. I'm sure the talk will be great, wish I could be there, but I'm in NYC, not London . . .
Well thought and written, thank you. I thought you might locate one source of this, as I think it is: Platonism: the insistence that the visible world is a (poor) imitation of the invisible 'real' world. It's unfortunate, because so much else of Platonism - the virtue theory, the philosophy as a way of life - is so productive of good; but this aspect, alas, has been productive largely of, as you write, paranoia, confusion, and guilt.
When I saw the subject was paranoia and Gnosticism I was certain there would be a Phillip mentioned, just not a Phillips.
The question I have is how does God plan? How could God plan without essentially creating people? We talk of the universe as a simulation, and we talk of God planning, but how could the two not be the same? If God has an image of a person in his mind, that image would have to be so precise as to essentially be the same as the thing itself? To know the beginning, end, and middle perfectly is to know the thing perfectly.
So is God just running scenarios with slight modifications until he gets the outcome he wants? What happens to the people in the sub-optimal scenario? How are the people in such a thing not people? And if they aren't, like they are limited in some key way, then the plan isn't complete and when they are breathed life, they can then act in ways that weren't anticipated. Even authors I've met will tell me they don't always know what their characters will do. Did Steinbeck know what would happen at each step when he started writing "East of Eden"?
I know it's pointless to use current computer based reasoning to elucidate the mind of God, but it seems to me there must be free will and even God couldn't have know the full ramifications, without essentially ensuring that there were billions of other "plans," possibly with creatures that loved and laughed, that were destroyed the moment they veered off the ideal path.
But then God exists outside even the concept of time. Maybe he started at the end and worked backwards. Who know if such things as start and end even make sense to such a mind.
I just read this article by Paul Kingsnorth--it has a deep connection to your theory of civilizational Gnosticism. Not the same argument, but a resonating one:
Great writing! I love the literary bent on this, so sorry for answering in plainer terms.
I don't think we can say the gnostics are *wrong* about there being a veil... it's a huge veil, and an evolutionary one. Evolution is a blunt designer, blindly optimizing for present reproduction; truth, happiness and long-term concerns can only fall through by near-accident. Our symbolic thinking faculties are so crudely tuned that we're liable to get terrorized by our own random thoughts. We reify our own thought patterns as if they were objective, and then wonder why the world doesn't work like it should. We fall for zero-sum social games all the times. But then the gnostics themselves fall for the veil of paranoia, and reify a mischievous conspirator in chief. That's where they get it wrong, as you yourself say. It's the silly world of Matrix, with its cartoonish villains running the show.
So "seeing behind the curtain" is absolutely needed, because there is a lot to see, and a lot of pressure not to see. Contra your the later part of the article, reaching deep into ourselves, looking for the deeper truths, is very much needed! Indeed your whole article, and so much human intellectual endeavour, and so much of literature, is precisely trying to do that. It's just that the *paranoid* mode of doing that is no longer called for.
Then the mainstream Christian story you contrapose.... isn't that also a conspiracy? A God who conspires to become human in order to redeem humanity is still very much shaped as a conspiracy. It's the story of a God who has a narrative in view, the story of a "good" top-down manipulator who will mess with us humans to bend things towards His purposes. Taken at face value, it devolves into the soothing myth of the adult in charge.
So yes, whatever we want to call it, I agree that we need to come out of paranoid thinking, and finally figure out that *there is no conspiracy*. Neither the villains of Matrix, nor the parochial Good God who bends to our human-shaped sense of the favorable or the good. In naturalist terms, it's an evolutionary, bottom-up story. But if you have a sense of God or spirit, then it means giving God back its transcendent freedom. As you say, wide open for play.
I don't know about all that, my friend. Sounds exhausting.
Yeah it's some heavy writing. It's also a heavy subject that you brought up! :)
As you say, we do have great difficulty inhabiting our bodies in this life, in this world as it really is.
Amen
Really, really good. Bravo. A real response requires work/time/energy that I cannot spare at present, but I do want you to know this is very strong indeed, IMAO. Keep it up. I'm sure the talk will be great, wish I could be there, but I'm in NYC, not London . . .
Thanks as always David!
Well thought and written, thank you. I thought you might locate one source of this, as I think it is: Platonism: the insistence that the visible world is a (poor) imitation of the invisible 'real' world. It's unfortunate, because so much else of Platonism - the virtue theory, the philosophy as a way of life - is so productive of good; but this aspect, alas, has been productive largely of, as you write, paranoia, confusion, and guilt.
Well put as always, Judith!
When I saw the subject was paranoia and Gnosticism I was certain there would be a Phillip mentioned, just not a Phillips.
The question I have is how does God plan? How could God plan without essentially creating people? We talk of the universe as a simulation, and we talk of God planning, but how could the two not be the same? If God has an image of a person in his mind, that image would have to be so precise as to essentially be the same as the thing itself? To know the beginning, end, and middle perfectly is to know the thing perfectly.
So is God just running scenarios with slight modifications until he gets the outcome he wants? What happens to the people in the sub-optimal scenario? How are the people in such a thing not people? And if they aren't, like they are limited in some key way, then the plan isn't complete and when they are breathed life, they can then act in ways that weren't anticipated. Even authors I've met will tell me they don't always know what their characters will do. Did Steinbeck know what would happen at each step when he started writing "East of Eden"?
I know it's pointless to use current computer based reasoning to elucidate the mind of God, but it seems to me there must be free will and even God couldn't have know the full ramifications, without essentially ensuring that there were billions of other "plans," possibly with creatures that loved and laughed, that were destroyed the moment they veered off the ideal path.
But then God exists outside even the concept of time. Maybe he started at the end and worked backwards. Who know if such things as start and end even make sense to such a mind.
Calm down, my friend. I think we don't have to know these things.
Beautiful, thank you for writing this. I will be thinking about it for a long time.
Thank you, my friend!
I just read this article by Paul Kingsnorth--it has a deep connection to your theory of civilizational Gnosticism. Not the same argument, but a resonating one:
https://firstthings.com/against-christian-civilization/
Interesting!