" It's unique in that it shows a singular God with the full spectrum of human emotion: anger, love, mercy, ruthlessness, jealousy."
Aren't there like ten different names for God in the bible?
" By comparison, the polytheistic mythologies of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece/Rome show a multitude of characters that together form a nice corpus of colorful stories but are individually flat and undeveloped"
Consider them all the same god and it becomes a very rich personage. Remember God has the full spectrum of human emotion! Angry, love, mercy, ruthlessness and jealousy.
"Basically the understanding of the unique and important aspects of gnosticism were that the gnostics thought the universe was a shitty prison..."
That's my only problem with them. Just about every religion depicts the exact same circumstance and I don't really see the bible as depicting the earth as a beautiful place. If it was why do we need a savior? Hindus/buddhists say the same thing. You just have to accept what they are saying as truth, this is a shitty place where shitty things happen alot and probably won't stop. Right? Case in point.
"it has more of a bitter and arrogant view of position of human beings in the universe, where they think humans are superior to the universe and dont' belong in it. "
I hate that too, that's actually why I stopped attending their lectures. However, that doesn't take anything away from it or the points about it I'm making.
I actually think it's kind of exciting here for that purpose exactly. Also, jesus and buddha both tried to fix the world so it must be worth something. I don't know, too much dread and not enough happiness, like you said. That's exactly how my girlfriend and I felt about them and their constantly oblivious voices. Personally I think there's alot that can be built, manifested and evolved here and I think that's part of what's great about the universe. I don't really see what's so great about an infinitey of abyss.
Also you know a funny thing about the fall that was presented to me by the tibetan book of the dead is that we perpetually and infiniteley fluctuate between states of supreme godly enlightenment down to lowly earth creatures again, which makes perfect fucking sense in context. If we fell once in eternity it's bound to happen again. I'm personally of the opinion that, if the fall is true, it happens all the damn time just as a natural function of existance.
"Nietzsche and other totalitarians who speculated that there was some superhuman essence to human beings that could be recovered through some kind of really brutal activity."
You mean like suffering and being sacraficed on the cross?
I also enjoy the parallels between buddhism and christianity in that respect. Buddha sees all the suffering in the world and wants to relieve them of that, so he gives up all of his earthly belongings(which he had alot of since he was an indian prince) and meditates under a tree(that's coincidentally made of wood just like the cross!lol no that's not really a good point) without eatting or sleeping until he attains enlightenment and then goes about trying to free men from suffering.
I don't know like I said I think it's all the same shit and the bible is teaching man-kind how to redeem themselves. Why else give them a moral outline? Shit, if man is already redeemed what's the point of the religion anyway? I used to have tons of points of how jesus wanted us to become like him, I'll have to try to remember them. I think the fact that he's called a shepherd who guides people is one factor. That he usually called himself son of man, which we all are, and also called us all sons of god. Um, some other stupid shit I can't remember.
"The New Testament is "weird" in that a Judean ascetic borrowed ideas from works of Plato to which he almost certainly had no literary access, and was something of a socialist 1500 years before Utopia was written. "
I find that weird too and is why I find it hard to accept the general consensus, i think plato or socrates derived alot of his knowledge from either india or possibly egypt. Their influence is a little more believable. It's just my personal belief that anybody who becomes "Enlightened" has these same core beliefs because, like i said, they are built on the universe around us.
That's probably all from me tonight I'm getting delirious.
Thanks for your interesting responses, goat and seth. If either of you guys want to reccomend and books or, preferably, online reading material I'd really appreciate it. Thanks.
Again sorry there's two threads about the same thing ;(