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betty boop: "Dear friend, you poke lots of fun at spirited irish.
Her research into gnosticism and its history is impressive; it is clear she is deeply alarmed by her findings, because she can clearly see how gnostic thinking has entered into the very climate of opinion "

Dear Ms boop: Gnosticism is a real word which first described real people (Greeks) who lived thousands of years ago.
These people rejected the material world, in favor of the spiritual realm.
When some of them first became Christians, they brought this dualism with them, and decided that Jesus Christ could not have been a real material human being, but must have been a spiritual projection of God.

So Gnostics were considered one of two great heresies facing the early Rome-centered Church.
The other was Arianism, which took the opposite opinion.
Arians said that Jesus was only a man, not God.
Arians were highly influenced by Jewish thinking which has always insisted that God is One, not some multi-headed monster.

Beginning in 325 AD the Roman Emperor Constantine brought all these bishops together at Nicaea and hammered out a compromise, wherein eventually God was fully defined (!) as One Person of Three "Substances."
And doesn't that sound just won--der--full, a com-pro-mise, where everybody stood around holding hands, singing Kum Bye Ya, praising God-in-three-persons, and all lived happily ever after, right??

And in the midst of all this happy wonderment, Emperor Constantine announced the "catch": anyone who disagreed with his new creed would be put to death, and their property seized by the state.
Yes, there was this, ahem, inconvenient matter of Constantine needing money for his treasury and where better to get it than from "heretics", "apostates", etc.?

And so it was, for the better part of 1,500 years, until in the Age of Enlightenment our Founding Fathers said: no more of that.

So today, some of these old "heresies" are rearing their heads again, but, but, but: not so much Gnosticism as that other ancient materialism: Arianism.

Arianism -- not Gnosticism! -- can easily be called the basis for all scientific & philosophical materialism.
In its modern form, Arianism not only insists that Jesus was human, but that there's no such thing as a spiritual realm.

So just where "Gnosticism" might even fit into the modern world -- all but barren of any spiritual references -- I can't imagine.
Then how Gnosticism could be such a great threat as spirited irish proposes, is beyond me.

But, maybe, maybe I missed something obvious, and like spirited irish need to get my eyes checked out?

So just where "Gnosticism" might even fit into the modern world — all but barren of any spiritual references — I can't imagine.... Then how Gnosticism could be such a great threat as spirited irish proposes, is beyond me.

Thank you for your discussion of Gnosticism and Arianism, dear BroJoeK. Very interesting! [I reject both.]

Mainly, I use the term "gnosticism" as Eric Voegelin defines it. Gnosticism is

...a type of thinking that claims absolute cognitive mastery of reality. Relying as it does on a claim to gnosis in the sense of immediate apprehension or vision of truth without the need for critical reflection, Gnosticism considers its knowledge not subject to criticism.... Gnosticism may take a transcendentalizing form (as in the case of the gnostic movement of late antiquity) or immanentizing forms (as in the case of Marxism, Comte's positivism, and other modern movements that seek radical intramundane fulfillment of human beings and society. — "Glossary of Terms," Eric Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections, 2006; p. 160f.

[Voegelin has a habit of stating his terms succinctly and exactly. That can take a little getting used to.]

As you may know, Voegelin was a philosopher of history and politics. His interest in gnosticism as a source of the modern-day "political religions" was particularly acute. His eight-volume History of Political Ideas is chock-full of in-depth studies of leading gnostics in history, from e.g., Hermes Trismagistus, Joachim of Fiore; Conte, Marx, Hegel, Jung, etc., etc. His Modernity Without Restraint details the types of personal and social disorders that manifest when gnostic ideas become dominant in the culture.

As they are today. I'll tell you this, dear BroJoeK: Once you see the gnostic "pattern," you tend to see it a lot nowadays — in academe, in the media, in the institutions; in the street movements; e.g., OWS.

Most obnoxious is the practicing gnostic's habit of forbidding questioning. The gnostic perpetrators are well aware that if their "systems" are subject to critical analysis, they would quickly deconstruct on the non-foundation of their own illogic. Voegelin says that Hegel — whom he praises as a very great genius and master of classical philosophy — was very aware of this danger. But he got around it masterfully:

"In conversations with Hegelians, I have quite regularly found that as soon as one touches on Hegelian premises the Hegelian refuses to enter into the argument and assures you that you cannot understand Hegel unless you accept his premises."

Talk about circular, solopsistic thinking!

If I understand correctly, what really flips out spirited irish is her recognition that gnostic systems have a nasty habit of "bumping off God." Such a thing, right there, could only be a "magical operation."

A magical act requires at least a suspension of what we'll call First Reality — if not its outright cancellation — on the part of its observer in order to be successful. WRT the "death of God," this is exactly what Nietzsche, Hegel, and Marx invite you to do. And they tell you just how easy it is to "kill God": Just decide that "God" is only a concept; that is, an abstract construction of the human mind. Then, just abolish the "concept." Ergo, "God is dead" — at least for you....

It's a pretty banal little "trick"; but a whole lot of people fall for it nowadays.

I could go on, but probably should put a sock in it for now. Suffice it to say I see plenty of Gnostics in American public life today, starting with the Obama Administration, which promises a new order of social justice and human happiness; and a new Heaven on Earth that eradicates all the ills of the human condition and satisfies the deepest needs of mankind — by enclosing man's God-given liberty and eschatological future within the steely bonds of State control, not to mention the necessary total sacrifice of the life of the mind involved in this trade-off....

Obama is the "new messiah," dont'cha know???

Thank you so very much for writing, BroJoeK!

“Gnosticism is a real word which first described real people (Greeks) who lived thousands of years ago.”

Spirited: Gnosticism did not begin with the Greeks, but with certain Jewish exiles in Babylonian. They sowed the seeds of Gnosticism with their occult Kabbalah. It is btw, the Kabbalahs’ Doctrine of Emanation that is the seedbed of modern evolutionary theories.

“...rejected the material world, in favor of the spiritual realm.”

Spirited: They did. However, they did at least retain a sense of “something” higher that allowed them to believe in a spiritual realm, even though there was really nothing there.

But in “killing” God, and closing off the supernatural realm, modern Western Gnostics (naturalists; empiricists, secular humanists, dialectical materialists, immanentists)have cast themselves into the abyss. For them there is nothing-—no source for life, consciousness, mind, meaning, or purpose.

Since just before the turn of the century Western Gnostics began fleeing to Buddhism and Hinduism in the belief that these Eastern systems would provide for them what naturalism took away. But what they do not know is that centuries before Jesus Christ walked this earth, Buddha took God away and deconstructed the Hindu idea of soul. But for a certain small segment of Hinduism that retains belief in God, all of the rest are types of naturalism.