/lit/ - Literature

The real and actually fruitful debate here isn't between judaized Christianity and Gnosticism, but between Gnosticism (arguably a radical Orphism) and Zoroastrian-type dualism - both are dualist, but the latter venerates the body and the material and holds that our goal is to expel darkness from an originally perfect creation, not to flee this creation to an unknown realm. Now there is a line of argument that is infinitely more provocative than the same old same old xtian pilpul ad nauseam.

>>16711845
>the totality

arguably the greatest cope ever concocted. if the place where you're standing is shit, why would the sum of all places to stand miraculously not be?

if, relative to the infinite, the finite is as nothing, then whence this discrepancy in the first place? completely useless proposition.

>>16711825
I read Plotinus years before I ever seriously looked at the gnostics.

>>16711832
>l-life denial

nietzschelets should be forbidden from putting their hands on a philosophy book until they're at least 35.

Do you think Holden might be a perversion of Sophia? He spawns violence wherever he ends up, and there are pieces of him/war in all humans, which contrasts nicely with Sophia's positive attributes. Additionally, the book ends with Holden "embracing" the Kid, and there are numerous references in Gnostic thought about receiving Sophia's embrace.

>>16515883
It allows the creator of the world around us to be flawed, while still containing a "perfect being" that satisfies all the usual philosophical arguments.