Leimeng said:
~ Let us first ask if you have some working definitions of gnosticism. (There are several actually.)
~ Do you have a gnostic definition of God?
~ Do you have a gnostic definition of man?
~ Do you have a gnostic definition of sin?
~ I bet one would be surprised at what gnosticism is and what it teaches.
~ I further think that if one actually knew what gnosticism was and what it teachers, one would not be so willing to parrot false accusations from false teachers about Kenyon et. al.
~ Continue to discuss amongst yourselves...
Peace,
Leimeng
Flatulo Ergo Sum ~~~
(***Insert Personal One Liner Here***)
Gnosticism was probably a collection of different teachings that were loosely related through a few general concepts. Much like the modern "new age" movement. In fact there are a great many similarities between the "new age" movement of our day, and the ancient gnostic teachings.. the reason for this is because there is a long string of connectors historicaly that can trace the path of ancient gnostic teachings down to today, in our day the inheritors of ancient gnosticism are the neo-pagan/wiccan movement and the new age movement.
The common threads of gnosticism are generaly seen as follows.
the term "gnostic" is taken from the greek "gnosis" meaning "knowledge". Gnostic religions centered around secret or hidden knowledge that had been acquired by the leaders and would be passed on to the followers. Often times this secret knowledge was said to have been revealed to the leaders by spiritual forces, even pagan dieties, or received from lost books of famous mythological psudo divine figures like Hermes Trismegistus.
Gnostic teachings tended to sharply divide the world of the physical from the world of the spirit, teaching that all physical things were inherintly evil and the things of the spirit were inherently good.
On the surface this sounds very christian, or christian-like.. however in biblical christianity the evil "flesh" does not refer to the actuall physical world itself but rather the fallen human nature, as Dids often likes to call it, the fallen human soulical nature. Nor are all things spiritual in christianity seen as good.
The result of this seemingly tiny insignificant difference in teaching was hugely profound in the rest of gnostic teaching.
Because the physical world was inherently evil it had two primary effects.. first the creator God became an evil diety.. the creator was the deity who shrouded our pure spirits in evil physical bodies and created the evil physical world to weigh us down and trap and trick us.. thus he is evil and mischevious...
Secondly, Jesus did not come in the flesh, because flesh is evil. Therefore In Gnostic teachings Jesus ceased to be a real flesh and blood human and became a solely spiritual figure, a kind of spirit guide.
Another fall out was that since physical bodies were seen as evil.. the differentiation between sexes was seen as an evil mischevious creation.. so the gnostics tended to do away with all gender distinctions, both in religion, and in every day life. They took this to the level of deliberately trying to appear as genderless or androgenous as possible even in their clothing.
Gnostic teachings as you can see based on one small distortion of christian doctrine produced a complete re-interpetation of scripture and world view. Because the creator God was evil.. it drasticly changed the story of the garden of Eden and the "fall" of mankind. In the gnostic version the new hero was the serpent. The serpent came to our first father offering to enlighten him and free him from the evil trickery that the creator had perpetrated by shrouding human spirits in flesh.. thus he offered them the enlightenment of divine knowledge which would return mankind to their original intended spiritual state thus making us "as gods". They also played off the fact that the hebrew word translated serpent actually means something like "the shining one" to portray the serpent as a glorious liberator and source of enlightenment. Some even went to the lengths of portraying JEsus and the seprent as the same entity.
gnosticism basicly stole a good deal from christianity, a good bit of paganism, mixed in some hebrew Kaballah and produced an esoteric tradition that would eventually become known as hermeticism after the greek god Hermes (and Hermes Trismegistus of egyptian fame). The hermeticism, and "hermetic kabalah" was later rediscovered in the middle ages during the revival of classical languages and fueled the medieval esoteric movements, alchemy etc. The interesting thing is that through out the middle ages all of the "occult movements" were firmly entrenched with christian ideas and christian terminology and even acknoledge general christian teaching.
During the enlightenment the medieval occultist movement died down as did religion in general, only to be reborn in the victorian age again as hermeticism, this time mixing in eastern philosophies such as dark path hinduism (tantra) and established secret societies like masonry etc. This gave birth to the "spiritist movement" and the theosophist movement which carried into the last century up to around world war II (actually having some strong connections with the rise of nazism). Then the modern occult traditions, paganism, and new age are basicly born out of the victorian age incarnation of hermeticism and theosophy.
. The trick is to know the difference. 
). I was only pointing out the weakness of your argument.
