Category Archives: Christian Gnosticism

Of Miracles & Natural Order

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One of the great questions of philosophy is, can a miracle truly occur? For some, it depends on how the term is defined. If a miracle is merely an unlikely occurrence, then the answer is easy. Yes. We all witness rare occurrences from time to time. From a sports team coming from far behind to win a championship no one thought them capable of, to accidents where someone narrowly escapes death. We often call these “miracles”, when perhaps they are more closely identified with chance occurrences with low probability.

More often we associate a true miracle when the laws of nature are broken. For instance, Jesus turning water into wine, walking on water, curing the sick, and his own resurrection from the dead. The Buddha was said to have the power of teleportation, the ability to duplicate himself, and manipulate the elements. The Prophet Muhammad was purported to manifest water, heal the sick and also had power over the elements. Today we also hear of modern day miracles which defy nature, such as shrines where people go to be healed or people claiming to see visions of God, saints or other types of entities.

So the question remains, do miracles really exist or are they just human projections on certain events? While we do have many reports of miracles, there are no proofs of miracles occurring to date. I think that’s a powerful statement in itself. There is no proof that has ever been recorded of a real, bonafide miracle.

Many theologians and theist philosophers, including Immanuel Kant, thought miracles didn’t matter. In fact, Kant though that miracles were actually a distraction from having faith. For Kant, miracles were the exception to the rule so it was better to not count on them in your life. Looking to the message of one’s faith was preferable to signs and wonders.

Philosophers such as J. L. Mackie and Michael Martin argue that interference with the natural order from God would prove that God wasn’t perfect. Why would God need to create miracles in the world if everything is going according to plan? Why would God play favorite and help some people and not others? Why would God let some people starve to death or be horribly injured, but save others from that fate through a miracle? Martin also suggests that somethings that appear as miracles to us, may not be God but anomalies that occur in nature that we simply cannot explain yet.

In Hermeticism, when one perfectly aligns themselves (the Below) to the Source Consciousness (the Above), they can achieve the Philosopher’s Stone.

I buy this. I think when we witness synchronicity, this has something to do with consciousness and quantum entanglement. It’s part of the natural order. I do not think a miracle has occurred. In fact, when I think of how magic, astrology and tarot work, I don’t think any of that is miraculous, but more of just how the world operates. I think our individual consciousness is connected to our higher-self or a higher state of consciousness, which may be thought of as our spirit. It’s the entity which keeps sending our soul on mission in the material world. Beyond that, I believe there is a collective consciousness that is societal which we all tap into on a planetary level, and a Source Consciousness which is singular, which all things in the universe share in as well. We share an archetypal bond and this is how things like astrology and tarot work and evolve over time. When we align with our higher-self and Universal Consciousness, we begin to notice synchronicities occurring in our lives. These may appear miraculous, but it’s merely part of the natural order unfolding.

Do miracles occur where the laws of nature are broken? I don’t think so, no. I think when they occur in sacred texts they are meant as metaphors to explain deeper truths. Does the death and resurrection of Jesus mean more if Christ was killed on our behalf as a sacrifice? Or does it mean more that Jesus was the perfect example to show us how to transform ourselves? The Christ story is the path we take to die to our old selves and be reborn as Divine spirits. It’s not about a physical miracle, but rather our spiritual reality if we choose that path.

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The Empire Never Ended

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I was considering today what the world would be like if the literalist Christians, who so missed the message of personal transformation and awakened consciousness, hadn’t become the the dominant religion in our world today. Would we still be a pagan society? Would an eclectic spiritual practice be the norm? Would some other type of monotheistic religion have risen up to fill the void? How would that have shaped our political, social and technological landscape?

The Judean People’s Front, or is this The People’s Front of Judea?

In his book, Caeser’s Messiah, Joseph Atwill makes the argument that Christianity in it’s literal interpretation, was invented by the Romans with the help of the Jewish scholar turned Roman citizen, Josephus. In Atwill’s argument, the Romans, under the auspices of the Flavian emperors, Vespasian, Titus and Domitian, did this as a means to control the Jewish population so that they would be more easily ruled. Jewish zealots were a major pain in the ass to the Roman Empire, so a religion that tells them to love each other, turn the other cheek, there is a better life waiting for them after they die, and so on, makes some amount of sense. Josephus, according to the theory, is there to make sure that they can encode the beliefs and morals of the new religion with Jewish culture and tradition. Atwill makes an interesting case and I do think that his theory is worth thinking about, even if I question some of his scholarship and conclusions.

For instance, early Christian-Jews did a really shitty job of converting Jews over to it. The main Jewish community wanted little to do with them. I imagine they were pretty over messiahs by then. They were super successful at converting the very people they really didn’t want to convert; gentiles. They were so successful at converting gentiles, that pretty soon there were more gentile Christians than Christian-Jews and eventually the Christian-Jews were kicked out of Christianity.

If this was a Roman plot, it had a lot of problems. Though that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. All sorts of bad ideas backfire in spectacular ways.

Romans Go Home! –Life of Brian

It’s been a few years since I read the book, but I’ve been reading more on the Gnostics and it occurred to me while doing my research that Atwill may still be on to something. It’s long been held that the Gnostic Christians were a branch of Christianity that came after the emergence of Christianity. While Gnosticism as a Pagan branch existed before either of them, the Christian version arose in response and criticism of mainstream Christianity. But I’m starting to think, based on more research, that isn’t true. It doesn’t even make sense to me. I think it’s quite possible that Christian Gnosticism came before Christian literalism as perhaps just a local Jewish version of Gnosticism (Timothy Freke and John Lamb Lush make this point in their books). The Romans may have then used some of the Gnostic stories to create the life and death of Jesus Christ into a single coherent narrative. In doing so, they systematically cut out a lot of the bits that empowered people like women, the poor and slaves. They wove a theology that treated the story as a literal truth rather than a more powerful symbolic truth that taught people how to tap into their own consciousness and divine power.

Why would the Romans do that? The same reason public education is pretty shitty today. They want drones to build empires, they don’t want free-thinkers. A few here and there is okay, they are needed to invent things and move technology forward. But masses of them? No way! There’s a reason psychedelic drugs are outlawed today and it’s not to protect us. The Romans were trying to control a vast empire and Gnosticism in it’s various forms was all over Alexandria and spreading out.

Constantine contemplating greatness

Late antiquity scholar, Candida Moss, did a good job in her book, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom, showing how systematic persecution of the early Christians just never happened. There are records of Roman procurators and centurions sending would-be martyrs home, confused by the offer they made to die for their god. Though I guess it was nice to know that should there be a war, some people were ready to just give up and die. By the time Flavius Valerius Constantinus came around, Christianity spread so far and wide that he had the one thing that would surely unite the Roman Empire for him – a single religion that didn’t rely on one’s ethnicity. Anyone could be a Christian regardless of where they were born. This was new in the world, and he used it to breath new live into the empire that had grown too big for it’s own good. He became Constantine, legalized the practice of Christianity in 313, and within the same century it became the state religion of Rome. By 325 the Council of Nicaea codified Christianity and soon any Christian branch outside of that pack is labelled heretical and systematically eradicated.

So, I have been wondering of late if Rome may have actually played a stronger hand than we’ve been aware of in the shape of the world today. It makes me think of the words of Phillip K. Dick, “THE EMPIRE NEVER ENDED.”

Perhaps not.