in response to this Vlogs guest speaker Steven Bancarz
[Unfortunately Steven’s understanding of Gnosticism is misguided, and that undermines the credibility of his his argument.]
Gnostics say that others are worshipping Yaldabaoth, the Demiurge (who falsely thinks he’s the one God) whereas the true God of the Universe can be identified with Sophia, wisdom, and beyond that a Spirit or Essence. The fact that we are as Jesus said ‘sons of God’ means that we all have the spark of divinity with us. That doesn’t make us equal to God or wanting to replace God. It means that we inherently know or experience that we are fundamentally connected to God in our being, but we are conditioned out of it by the materialism and separateness of the ego on the material plane. Gnosticism takes a highly personal ‘experiential’ approach to communion or knowing the connection with the ‘absolute’ or’godhead’, rather than the ritual of catholic applied dogma forced upon unthinking and uncritical men. How many Gnostics were involved in the Crusades, the Inquisitions, Indulgences, Confession, or the construction of a Corporation of power to control men? None! They even passed the role of the church leader between them for each ceremony in the spirit of ‘brotherhood’, ‘equality’ and ‘democracy’… the perfection of true Christianity as Jesus had shown us. The Corporation of the Church denounces all these things and thus has became corrupt and an empty vessel. Power, money and influence corrupts nearly ALL men’s hearts, so don’t deceive yourselves… the cognitive biaises of corrupted humans are obvious to penetrate for those ‘who have eyes to see’ and ‘ears to hear’. One should only listen to saints and prophets who are pious and sacrifice their lives, livelihoods and income by denying the traps and cages of the material world in order to to bring you their ‘unadulterated’ understanding and interpretion of the ‘Word’. How else can one prove one’s integrity, one’s validity and one’s message, without ‘Abandonment to Divine Providence’, without fully carrying one’s cross. Truths can only be found through authentic stoicism. Otherwise the false prophets are no better than the publicans. “Verily they have their reward.”
Valentinus
The possibility of unadulterated Christian teaching based on disseminating knowledge and experience of ‘Christ’ was snuffed out on the death of Valentinus. Here is the age old ploy of him being accused of the crime of heresy ( only after his death, when he was unable to defend himself) that the accusers in the Catholic Church went on to perpetrate themselves for almost 2000 years. Those very same people who ‘reimagined’ the original ‘Catholic’ Church to confound and distance men from God, to act as their conduit to divine knowledge, to control men, kings and countries, foment wars and enrich themselves beyond measure in the ‘name’ of their God. Didn’t anyone in the Church actually read the sermon on the mount or remember the 10 commandments.. Hypocrites all.
From A Gnostic for All Seasons -by Stephan A. Hoeller
The Gnostic contention is that both the world and humanity are sick. The sickness of the world and its equivalent human illness both have one common root: ignorance. We ignore the authentic values of life and substitute unauthentic ones for them. The unauthentic values are for the most part either physical or of the mind. We believe that we need things (such as money, symbols of power and prestige, physical pleasures) in order to be happy or whole. Similarly we fall in love with the ideas and abstractions of our minds. (The rigidities and the hardness of our lives are always due to our excessive attachment to abstract concepts and precepts.) The sickness of materialism was called hyleticism (worship of matter) by the Gnostics, while the sickness of abstract intellectualism and moralizing was known as psychism (worship of the mind-emotional soul). The true role of the facilitators of wholeness in this world, among whom Jesus occupied the place of honor, is that they can exorcise these sicknesses by bringing knowledge of the pneuma (spirit) to the soul and mind.