The Heart of Gnosticism

Gnosticism is not a particular set of beliefs; rather, it is a learned philosophy concerning the ethical relationship between authoritative power and its constituency

Gnosticism is not a particular set of beliefs; rather, it is a learned philosophy concerning the ethical relationship between authoritative power and its constituency. A philosophy abhorrent to those who crave abuse of such power. It is the heart and soul of the message brought by The Son of Man.

One will find that when orthodox religion and narrative science team up, the offspring of such a union are often the grandest of lies.

The Prime Huckster (Demiurge)

I struggled through a philosophical polemic recently, one in which the speaker condescendingly framed Gnosticism as “…a fake religion, a counterfeit science, an obliteration of understanding reality, and the inability to detect the real.” In this talk, the speaker oversimplified the world into two esoteric and fanciful camps: Faith and Reason (what he called ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘Athens,’ respectively) versus Gnosis (‘Alexandria’), or this monolithic straw enemy (see Wicker Man Argument) set in opposition to any and all ideas inside the domain of “that which is Real.”

I find it poignantly allegorical that the latter, Alexandria, housed an extensive library arguably documenting mankind’s origins, discoveries, history, and philosophy—millennia of work on the part of faithful men, ironically immolated by the former two under the very guise of

   a. (Pseudo) Faith – I possess the knowledge of God.
   b. (Pseudo) Reason – I possess the skills of God.

One should note that the only distinction between faith and reason, as posed in the context of this polemic, is the rhetorical framing of what I call the divine-self. Here, faith and reason function within a principle known as complementarity, where two seemingly opposite or distinct concepts are actually two sides of the same underlying obsessive reality (“I am God”). They are simply expressed according to the semantic tastes or obsession of the participant.

In contrast, the Gnostic retreats from any form of posing as any kind of god. This is the very essence of the Gnostic creed: the ethical relationship between authoritative power and its constituency, both official and imposed upon others. When the Gnostic cites a connection to source, it is a claim to dependency and blessing, not a claim to the power and authority of a god. God is defined by the Gnostic as that entity which accrues authority while simultaneously displacing and avoiding accountability—the huckster.

This is why the Gnostic rejects the Old Testament Gods. This is why the Gnostic questions cravings for symbolic power. To the Gnostic, these are familiar habits.

When a person establishes a false dilemma in this manner, identifying the divine-self as allying with only that which is 'real,' then of course every other thing is rendered 'esoteric' by default. Nor does a reasonable person broad brush every member inside a group as co-identifying with that group's most extreme elements. This is called prevarication, or lying by means of a false unstated premise to an otherwise semantically true statement. It is the ploy of the huckster, which slips by the sensibilities of the simple-minded.

Now, as well, set aside the key principle that faith is an expression of life-ethic and not a set, much less a particular set, of beliefs. In our articles Eternal are the Embers and The ‘Narrative Redshift’ we outline in detail and with key examples how ‘Athens’ and ‘Jerusalem’ conspired to irrevocably harm mankind through their dogmatic efforts to ensure there existed only The Real™.

The fact one comes to realize through a life spent inside authentic research is this, the syndicates of faith and reason have lied to mankind about our origins, nature of being, and state of captivity. This comprising one of the most horrendous sins of legend. An unforgivable blasphemy in human rights (see The Distinction Between Bias and Agency: The Misdeeds of Men and Gods).

Beware of any ‘faith and reason’ which thrives progressively as ignorance increases or information is expunged.

The speaker thereafter bucket-categorized all Gnostics as a “parasites” and “a cult, wanting to be a religion.” When one adopts the robes of false-dilemma orthodoxy, of course, every other tenet of philosophy, knowledge, belief, law, science, or ethics will seem a contrathetic parasite to one’s authority or ability to fleece the herd for their money, obedience, and abuse. Gnostics don’t form churches, cults, or seek money—and that, dear reader, is indeed a sin in the eyes of those who do crave such trappings. I find it ironic that the bucket-name ‘parasite’ can be ascribed to a victim, not based upon a specific set of objectionable beliefs or practices, but rather based upon the simple litmus: “They ain’t the virtuous us.” This simplistic and malicious view of life is what the Gnostic warns us about. It is indeed the hard lesson of history itself.

It will either contradict the The Real™, in which case it is heretical, or it will agree with The Real™, and is thus superfluous. It is reasonable therefore to destroy it in either case.

~ ‘Faith’ and ‘Reason’ used to justify the burning of The Library at Alexandria¹

The speaker further then framed his extraordinary view of the world with the autoaufheben boast, “I’ve never said anything complicated in my entire life.” There is a reason why the most ubiquitous tagline of the huckster is, “You see, it’s simple.” Part of the entire formula of the huckster is that they and their quarry wallow in simpleton—celebrating this as a virtue even. In this manner, nuance is able to be slipped by unnoticed. The ‘simple’ bifurcation he outlined above was indeed extraordinarily complicated—its nuance cleverly concealed from the listener in the form of huckster-speak.

Halfway through this lecture, it became clear to me that this speaker had learned what faith was by looking it up in Hebrews 11:1 (believing correct things—hoped for and not seen) and searching for the term reason on Google (reliance upon epistemology—not magical thinking). In other words, Kmart faith and reason. He wholly underestimated what these principles actually mean, believing them to result from a state of having adopted the correct answers, as opposed to the process of spiritually and emotionally maturing life realization—one earned through a set of broad and challenging life trials, honed skills in deductive inference, love of those within your reach, the keen and quiet observation of how evil and deceit function in the mind of man, and humility before creation in terms of what you know and do not know.

Any time you spiritually judge (claim divine-self status over) whole masses of people for the simple act of dissent, for not toeing your line of orthodoxy (pseudo-faith), and further, enlist the social bullying aid of frustrated parent’s basement intellectuals to boot (pseudo-reason), and condemn those who will not bow the knee to your ‘humility’, trust me—there is nothing simple in what you offer—you are speaking in a particular native tongue.

‘Simple’ is often ‘complicated’, wearing the most clever of disguise.

One critical life lesson which southerners learn in particular resides in this tenet: a simple ‘good ol’ boy,’ is none of those things. When someone offers up the boast of being ‘never complicated,’ keep a watch over your wallet, property, and children—the boast itself being a warning flag of ill-intent towards specific targets. My speculation is that the speaker disdained the ‘Gnostic parasite,’ as he termed it, precisely because a huckster is threatened by any presence which bears the depth and ability to discern nuance and detect his shtick.

When entering a room, always maintain an awareness of those who are threatened by competence.

The huckster will frame the Gnostic as ‘anti-reason‘, faithless, out of touch, and most importantly, isolated. One thing you learn during the study of ponerology inside ethical skepticism is that the demonic will first seek to isolate its victim (see The Riddle of Sin). Such spin bears false fruit. There are particular reasons why philosophers such as Foucault, Kierkegaard, and Arendt decry the proclivities of institutional power in their philosophical works. Who is targeted by power, along with the false faith and reason which underpin such targeting, are the keys to understanding the mind of The Prime Huckster (known as Samael, Shemyaza, or the demiurge in various Gnostic writings).

The actual offense of the Gnostic, one he commits against The Prime Huckster (the demiurge) and his sycophancy, resides in this species of mistrust. The Gnostic actually heeds what Christ said about those who lust for power and Godship over others, “…you want to carry out the desires of your father. When he lies, he speaks in his native tongue, because he is a liar and the father of lies,” and “You shall know them by their fruits.”²

An Example of Their Fruits: The Sea Lioning Amendment

One example of the detriment of being so simple-minded that one remains open to abuse by orthodoxy or authority resides in the outcome of the recent Supreme Court Hearing defined in Murthy, Surgeon General, et al. v. Missouri et al.³ In this landmark case, a series of plaintiffs sued to seek an injunction against the Federal Government for their coercive censorship activities directed at specific ideas and persons during the Covid-19 pandemic. We were part of those ‘persons and ideas,’ so I fully acknowledge and accommodate for my bias in this. This coercion was directed through social media companies by various agencies of the Federal Government who contacted them to do so.

In short, the appeal for injunctive relief not only failed, but a new precedent was set inside the issued ruling 603 U.S. 23-411 (2024) regarding such appeals for redress against any governing entity in the future. In the Majority Opinion, Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote as follows:⁴

We begin—and end—with standing. At this stage, neither the individual nor the state plaintiffs have established standing to seek an injunction against any defendant. We therefore lack jurisdiction to reach the merits of the dispute.

Our decisions make clear that “standing is not dispensed in gross.”

A proper case or controversy exists only when at least one plaintiff “establish[es] that [she] ha[s] standing to sue,” ibid.—i.e., that she has suffered, or will suffer, an injury that is “concrete, particularized, and actual or imminent; fairly traceable to the challenged action; and redressable by a favorable ruling.

It is a bedrock principle that a federal court cannot redress “injury that results from the independent action of some third party not before the court.”

The primary weakness in the record of past restrictions is the lack of specific causation findings with respect to any discrete instance of content moderation. And while the record reflects that the Government defendants played a role in at least some of the platforms’ moderation choices, the evidence indicates that the platforms had independent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their own judgment. The Fifth Circuit, by attributing every platform decision at least in part to the defendants, glossed over complexities in the evidence.

What Justice Barrett did here was to communicate a precedent, one which reached far beyond the required scope of the ruling itself. She broached dictation of de facto legislation in addition to the ruling. Instead of just denying standing, she went further and defined a novel litmus establishing standing for such cases in the future. In other words, a constituent under government authority can no longer petition for redress under the First Amendment simply based on the grounds that a governing authority abused its power and violated their civil or human rights. The constituent must now prove all of the following:

1. The Plaintiff personally was harmed in terms of a specific, defined, and measured injury, or will be harmed in the future by such defined and measured injurious actions, and

2. That this harm was wholly caused by actions of the Governing entity with no third-party involvement, and

3. That all contributing, intermediary, or third parties, known or unknown, must also be named in the petition a priori, and

4. That such injury can be proved to be directly and solely linked to and caused by a specific Government action, and

5. Such injury or future potential thereof can be suitably redressed or remediated by the Court’s action.

6. (Yet to be tried: when the government tenders immunity from prosecution to a third party, inside a permissive or deployment of violation in human rights – does this meet the definition of ‘joint action?’)

This is a ludicrous and near-impossible litmus—called ‘The Sea Lioning Amendment’ (Prove it!)—as it negates all of our civil and human rights protections through emasculation of the First Amendment, which serves as the muscle for the Bill of Rights. Citizens may be denied speech, healthcare, banking, employment, products, food, transportation, their property, and/or housing, by any third party, under the sole discretion of that third party, on behalf of any Government entity so long as it cannot be proven that the Government directly encouraged such activity be imposed on specific parties, and that such activity resulted in quantifiable harm to those parties.

Associate Justice Samuel Anthony Alito Jr., writing for the Minority in the ruling, stated his opinion on this extreme form of litmus as follows:

What the officials did in this case was more subtle than [ham-handed censorship] …Officials who read today’s decision …will get the message. If a coercive campaign is carried out with enough sophistication, it may get by. That is not a message this court should send.

Indeed, the “enough sophistication” bar is set very low in this instance. Avoiding this litmus is achievable by even the most obtuse of Party Member in the future. Accordingly, we have lost our right to redress, by specific and novel definitions for ‘lack of standing,’ by this precedent, against the abuse of power on the part of any future government entity or action.

Gnosticism and Spiritual Maturity

Gnosticism is the chief threat to The Prime Huckster.

How does this example apply to Gnosticism? Contrary to what the lecturer framed in our article’s opening, Gnosticism is not a cult, parasite, wannabe religion, or any derivation of esoteric knowledge. Gnosis means ‘knowing’ – and is a process of recapturing one’s authenticity from a world which has erased and corrupted it. It is an individual human right. It is more of a life-learned realization about the reality of our rulers and the plight of mankind which comes as a result of their lusts. It is a reasoned position and suspicion which results as a part of emotional and spiritual maturity.

I do not need to be God (Judge) over my neighbor. I am not addicted to the fruits of their abuse and suffering (see What is Loosh?). I do not need to escalate my reach to that of de facto Judicial, Legislative, and Executive power by a mere stroke of my brilliance and abuse of those vulnerable and in my charge. Gnosticism is an ethical form of skepticism towards the self-claimed and esoteric authority of those sea lioning in the name of ‘reason’ and ‘faith.’ Gnosticism is a petition for redress under dogmatic or manipulative forms of power (see The Lord’s Prayer).

Gnosticism is a hard-earned spiritual maturity which cannot be achieved by means of orthodox religion alone. It is the level of complexity and discernment which allows one to spot the huckster, and to realize when human rights have become an unblemished sacrifice to capricious and hungry Gods.

Gnosticism is a hard-earned and ethical stance against illegitimate forms and abuses of power, whether human or spiritual. One will find that when orthodox religion and narrative science team up, the offspring of such a union are often the grandest of lies.

A constituent under the power of an authority perpetually bears legal standing to seek redress against that power.

This is a straightforward (not ‘simple’) spiritual principle as well. This is why the Libraries at Alexandria were burned and pilfered. This is why our most revealing ontological histories as mankind, most of which focus on this very issue, have only recently been disinterred from hidden caves near to Alexandria, Egypt. Mankind as it turns out, is not under The Law of Samael/Shemyaza/Saturn/Yahweh/Enlil – the Gods of their esoteric and awesome insistence – and we do maintain the right to redress against the illegitimate powers and principalities that tyrannically rule over our world – before a Greater Court. One which operates free of games, technicality, cleverness, entrapment, original sin, orthodoxy, and unreasonable litmus.

This is the heart and soul of the message brought by The Son of Man.

The Ethical Skeptic, “The Heart of Gnosticism”; The Ethical Skeptic, WordPress, 28 Jun 2024; Web, https://theethicalskeptic.com/?p=91042