Wow !! Ive been reading your notes but cannot understand what you are trying to say . What does, ” adverts and cheap credit”, mean?

Anyway, best of luck to you.

Well, I’d like to read your long brilliant reply sometime 😉 In truth, after this post I went and read some of the New Testament like Matthew and was surprised how angry it is. Maybe I make more out of the similarities than is really there. Are the other gospels as much about judgement and retribution?

The Gnostics of the Nag Hammadi were Christians, as is evident from the Gospel of Thomas. But I guess if you view them as genuinely heretical and not just deemed so by the Church as it consolidated violently, then the difference is greater. Personally, the biggest problem with mainstream Christianity is theodicy, and the Gnostic telling gives a way out there. The fallen world of death is quite broken really, so I find it more straightforward to acknowledge that openly (as in the 1st noble truth of suffering). There are ways around it, such as the acknowledgment that the world is actually infinite and holy, primordially pure as in Blake or Dzogchen, and it is only our egotistic closed perception that causes it to appear as a fallen dying deceptive world of misery and folly. That could work, I suppose, in that the created world then would be pure and lacking all the defects of sin and death, but then why the Fall? It becomes difficult, whereas a story that says this world arose from ignorance => mistaken action => a life of suffering, that all hangs together pretty well. And then the remedy makes sense: wisdom understanding the true identity of the self (egolessness) => virtuous action => liberation from suffering and death.

Jeff, I like your reply. Fred