While the poor fellow is on yet another temporary ban I thought I’d contribute to
@gnostic Bishop’s evangelical one-man war on the world’s billion or so Christians by starting a thread to explain what he describes as the best religion ever invented - Gnosticism or Gnostic Christianity as it is sometimes called, although its links to Jesus Christ are not necessarily integral to it’s beliefs and practices. I’m kind of writing this out to get the facts straight in my own head, so I can argue better with old GB if/when they let him back in.
I am not a Christian myself and I do not go to church - so this isn’t personal justification. I just get irritated by people who use fake history, outright bullshit, and ideology to slander groups they hate on the internet. Feel free to add anything you additional information you like and correct any errors I make (there will likely be a few)
For the purposes of clarity, when I refer to ‘Christians’ in what follows I am talking about mainstream organised religions - not small independent non-denominational or evangelical churches/sects/missions such as you often find in the US. Christians here means essentially:
1. Early Christians - who were also often also Jews or Greeks of various religious and philosophical sects/groups - who began to form the proto-Catholic Church. This is the period of AD 33-AD 313 (when with the Edict of Milan, Emperor Constantine made Christianity officially legal and thereafter the de facto official religion of Rome.
2. The Catholic Church. Many people today forget or never knew that the ONLY Christians from the 2nd to 11th centuries were effectively ‘Roman’ Catholics. In the 11th Century the Great Schism occurred and the Eastern Orthodox Church split from the Roman Church. It is during this long period that the Roman Church debated doctrine and dogma and determined what was official and what was heresy. Consequently there were groups from to time time - sometimes backed by political power/kings etc - who called themselves Catholics/Christians but who held views that the offical Church did not endorse. These groups were either brought into the Church, expelled from Catholic regions, or occasionally imprisoned or executed.
3. Catholics Vs Protestants (beginning with Lutherans): in the Reformation during the 16th Century in Europe many groups abandoned Catholicism due to longstanding doctrinal and political concerns and denied Catholicism was the only legitimate form of Christianity. These groups eventually coalesced into the main Protestant churches (Presbyterian, Episcopal, Lutheran, Baptist, Methodist and Wesleyan). This is effectively who I mean by modern-day Protestant Christians.
It is vitally important to recognise that making totalising claims about ‘Christians’ - such as GB does when he (endlessly) says “the Christian God is a genocidal homophobic misogynistic monster” is really pointless and intellectual barren. Christianity has ALWAYS been in a state of flux as it faces diverse ideas and either incorporates them or itself fractures along doctrinal lines forming new churches/factions/sects etc.
It is also vitally important to recognise that “Church” and “Christians” are not the same thing. The “Church” is the institutional body that controls doctrine and dogma. “Christians” are people who identify as being members of a Church but who accept and practice the rules of that Church to varying degrees. For example: the Catholic Church says contraception is a mortal sin, yet every Catholic woman I’ve ever fucked (and there are many) was on the pill. Similarly, Methodists are required to tithe 10 % of their income to their Church - but many do not and cheat on their tithing just like they do on their taxes.
Next Issue: Defining Gnosticism
Stay Tuned.
