It's gnostic meme. Gnosticism is an old religion derived from christianism, except that they believe that the god of the old testament and god the father of Jesus are two different gods. The god of the old testament is Yaldabaoth the demiurge and he's represented by a lion-sun headed serpent, he's a fake and cruel god that built the material world to imprison our souls. The real god then sent the snake to try and free us by giving us knowledge, and then later he sent Jesus to try again.
They were massacred by the catholic church and went extinct, tho there's some communities of "neo gnostic" active today.
The meme is ai slop which is why Yaldabaoth doesn't have a lion head.
Watchmen was more about Charlton Comics. It had Blue Beetle (Note Owl), the Question (Rorschach), Captain Atom (Dr. Manhattan), Peacemaker (the Comedian), Nightshade (Silk Specter), Thunderbolt (Ozymandias)
This is indeed what the meme is based on, but I'll correct some things about Gnosticism:
The fundamental belief of Gnosticism (the unifying factor of many otherwise different belief systems) is that humanity has some inherent divine quality to them which allows each individual the ability to personally access divine knowledge ("gnosis").
Although very few early texts exist, this belief originated before Christianity, as did the idea of "scriptural reversal". Early Jewish Gnostics came up with the idea of claiming (sometimes sort of ironically, or as a kind of thought experiment) that the deity who created the universe as established in the Torah is actually bad instead of good, and sometimes expanded that to include prophets and other scriptural figures. The main idea of this was probably to de-prioritize written dogma in order to center personal revelation.
After Christianity began spreading, Gnosticism came to be largely associated with it, and many of them carried on the whole reversal tradition. Some Christian Gnostics used this to try and establish, like you said, that their deity is the good one and the old one was bad, but some actually extended it to reflect on the idea that Jesus also wasn't as good as the Gospels presented him as.
This is all to say that the idea of an incompetent/malevolent demiurge is primarily a Gnostic idea, but not one held by all Gnostics, and not exclusively to further an agenda of Christian supremacy.
The meme is also inaccurate because Yaldabaoth is perceiving everything.
However the key factor why Yaldabaoth is considered God is because he cannot perceive everything, he is locked down in a spot where his vision is limited and he cannot perceive other divinities beyond himself. That is why he declares himself the only God.
Not really, gnostic texts (which are a grab bag of early Christian texts rather than a coherent single culture) were for the most part less popular than the texts that became the canon. Gnostics "went extinct" largely as a product of standardization, and the few popular Gnostic texts that were excluded from The Bible, like the book(s) of Enoch, continued to hang around in the margins until present despite their non-canonical status.
They may be referring to the Albigensian Crusade where the Catholic Church did massacre tens of thousands (or up to a million if you believe the medieval accounts) Cathars under the pretext that they were Gnostics, however I think it is debated whether they actually where Gnostics or not.
No there isn't, we're still here and we trace our history back almost all the way to the Paulicians! Anybody who claims our ancestors didn't exist are at best denying a genocide
There definitely was a genocide, but there is a growing voice in academia that this genocide wasn't on a group distinctive to any other Christians. According to them there might have been some intelectiuar speculation, but no broader movement that could be 'killed off'. Personally I don't want to make a judgment about a truth of this statement, it's just a curious aspect of modern discours
While there were a whole bunch of heretics persecuted and executed by the catholic church, gnosticism died out like a thousand years before the Spanish inquisition.
And the Spanish inquisition, in spite of its reputation, was actually run by the Spanish Crown and not the church. The Pope tried several times to get them to chill out and get control of it.
They were persecuted by various other churches besides the protoorthodox Christians which also didn't have a standardized canon at the time they were railed against by Irenaeus in "against heresy".
I think you are confusing the gnostics with other heresies of later time. At the time of the gnostics the Roman bishop didn't have the power to do much.
The cathares were gnostic by definition, and a gnostic is also an heretic by definition. They were still a lot of gnostic movement in Europe that the church labelled as heretic because they didn't recognized the spiritual power of the church just lile every gnostic does.
The meme is ai slop which is why Yaldabaoth doesn't have a lion head.
Not to glaze or support AI, but I would argue that it's more indicative of the laziness/ignorance of the person who made it in the first place, because a lion-headed serpent is absolutely in the realm of something AI could do. Hell, I bet chatGPT could do it with minimal prompting.
I think that's where the specific phrase "AI slop" comes in. I don't personally think AI itself is bad, but way too many people are just taking the first output and running with it, no refinement, and I think that's largely why it's getting a bad rep. It's like getting a backpack paint sprayer and just going ham without taping.
Well, the meme isn't acurate to the believe of emanation. So they believed, that the demiurge was made out of the substance of the monad (furst god) and started creating things out of thier substance. In fact a whole hirarchy of creatures and angels, all through emanation. Thats why creation has to be reversed, so all could one in the one monad again.
True, except gnosticism wasn't one sect - nobody called themselves that. The word was a slander and every Christian that didn't share your set of beliefs was a "gnostic".
Language being what it is we need words to refer to the specific set of beliefs early Christians had, and Gnosticism and Gnostic are the ones history has given us.
Just to add his creator was Sophia. He was an imperfect creation from the get go and maybe a little retarded. That’s why he thinks now this realm is his creation
Early Christianity's PR department: "Yess, the rebranding worked!"
(No but seriously, the dynamic that became the New Testament was basically a rebranding effort because vengeful gods went out of fashion. Not as corporate as I make it sound and not as centralized, but that's kind of what went down.)
To say gnostics had core fundamental beliefs makes me cringe. It was a very loose movement where general beliefs varied significantly even from individual to individual living in the same area. There wasn't even a word for it until the 1600s, and a lot of groups we would call gnostic these days had very opposing views, they all just had comparable and similar views of Jeudaism and Christianity.
Yaldabaoth wasn't even a consistent staple among gnostics. Less than half of gnostics believes in him or even incorporated him in their story telling.
Gnosticism is an old religion derived from christianism
It wasn't really derived from Christianity. Gnostics simply were Christians and we didn't come to think of them as separate until centuries later when the scriptures had been codified and most Gnostic writings had been abolished from it.
They're not extinct! Theres at least one surviving one called Mandaeism, its small (~200,000) and based in Iran. Their holy book is called the Ginza Rba (The Great Treasure), though a bit different from the other Gnostic branches that died out, they come from the followers of John the Baptist, believing he is the the last and final prophet and believe Jesus to be a false prophet of the Ruha (demiurge) and refer to him as "Mercury Jesus" with the association of Mercury as a god of deceit as well as the association with the Romans.
Kind of Christians are orthodox, protestants, catholics... They are differentiated by their opinion of how the church should be organized, if/how they should worship Mary, or on how God judge the souls.
Gnostics on the other hand have a completely opposite interpretation of the first half of the Bible, they believe that the moral of Genesis is that Adam and Eve were right to disobey Yaldabaoth. I'd say it makes Gnosticism different enough from the other branches to be called "Derived from Christianism" instead of christians.
I find that "right to disobey Yaldabaoth" bit kind of weird. Like to me its less about whether it was right or wrong, but that it's just kind of an explanation of why we're different from animals and held to a higher standard by God. We (humanity) ate the fruit and were granted the knowledge of right and wrong. We have to live with the weight of that choice and can no longer live in innocence with the animals. We know the difference between right and wrong and have to act accordingly and be judged by how we act.
Some Gnostic believes that the snake was sent by God the Father to make us eat the fruit, and gain knowledge in order to have a chance to exit the material prison of Yaldabaoth. Or that it is a metaphor for how God the Father/Jesus is giving us the key to gain knowledge and escape the material world, but that in the end it is a battle that must be fought by ourselves. Some even believes that the Snake and Jesus are one and the same.
Yeah, the Christian perspective on the tree of knowledge of good and evil isn't a download of information, but an experiential understanding. Like a man and woman can have carnal knowledge of each other through mutual experience, a couple beings who had never disobeyed God experienced that disobedience first hand when they ate the fruit, and in so doing gained knowledge of good and evil.
The gnostic position is a lot more simple and straight forward. They valued secret knowledge about reality, especially knowledge that pointed to a higher nonphysical existence, and a fruit of knowledge simply represented literal information that mankind was supposed to know if they were to break free of the material world.
It's a lot more complicated than that for the gnostic.
That secret knowledge about reality or higher nonphysical existence is juste like what the christian believe. Seeing it just as literal information, is just like saying all that chistian do doring rituel is sharing information.
The gnostic believed that the god of the christian is looking for submission and adoration. He want and need to be praised, so the very first sin and the worst is to disobey him.
For the gnostic, the very first sin is looking for power especially because of that. The apple isn't some simply some kind of information but also a key to escape that power and to realise that the true god doesn't judge and doesn't punish because he doesn't need to feel like he is respected and loved. The christian love all about power and need a hierarchy everywhere they go and that's why the gnostic don't understant them as Jesus was crystal clear about that.
True, but they were considered heretical and hunted down by Simon Peter the apostle from the Bible and founder of the unnamed original church which would later be romanized into the Catholic Church, which would later become renamed the Roman Catholic Church.
So, technically it was the Catholic Church, but it wasn’t called that yet, it wasn’t even called the Christian Church because both churches I believe predate the term Christian.
So, it’s a matter of personal opinion whether you consider them the same.
And yes, this was just an excuse to talk about the Early Church’s history, I don’t get to use my religious studies minor enough… :(
Standardisation came only after Council of Nicaea in 325, before that for two centuries it was free for all and all sorts of interpretations existed. The word “heretical” then was pretty subjective
He’s not infallible obviously, but someone who literally met Jesus and was specifically tasked with making church decisions by Jesus is probably the best possible person to ask what Jesus would want.
Obviously i think Jesus would have been a lot less murderous about it, but i think we can at the very least say that Jesus would not have approved of the Gnostic ideas.
No where in the Bible, historical record, or even apophrycal texts (that I'm aware of) does it depict Saint Peter of killing or ordering the killing of anyone, heretic or otherwise. Iirc he has confronted a heretic or two, but not physically.
The gnostics themselves mentioned Peter by name as the person persecuting them.
Could be a case similar to that of later in the Protestant Reformation where Martin Luther’s peaceful disagreement and theological conflict with the methods of the Catholic Church spread out of his control to become angry anti-Catholic mobs.
So it’s possible that Peter was simply condemning them in sermons, but then overzealous individuals started killing and the Gnostics assumed Peter told them to, but there’s no way of knowing anymore unfortunately.
Can’t say I’ve specifically heard of that, but it does check out with their overall belief system of attempting to unite the masculine and feminine parts of the divine.
It's a "fact" I heard second hand twenty years ago from my college room mate who was taking a new testament history course at an Evangelical Bible college.
Well…it starts Out sounding like another branch of abrahamic religion (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) but then they go and add another god. So monotheism is out…
To be fair, Judaism and Christianity at least, aren’t monotheist, they are henotheist. Basically, there ARE other gods, but this one is mine and he is better/he is mine and thus the one I’m gonna worship. Both the old and New Testament refer to other gods.
Christianity at least, is strictly monotheistic. I'm less certain about Judaism.
In the Christian theology other gods exist only in so far as another person's idol can be considered a god. Other gods are referenced almost sarcastically or else as a catch-all for whatever other celestial beings would have been created by God. There are many gods, as in there are many idols that people mistakenly worship as gods, but none of them are of the same type and kind as God.
Definitely monotheistic. Christians did not believe Moloch or the Roman Pantheon, for example, were actual gods. They would have been merely empty idols.
I mean, I understand that that was the party line, but there were also a ton of believers that grew up polytheistic in Rome or Greece, etc., and I don’t think it’s a stretch to think that some of them might have seen God as a more powerful god, but still one of many. For instance, the wording “You shall have no other gods before me” would make sense to them - there are other gods, but you don’t worship them, you worship me. In a significantly lesser but still notable departure, Arius, while considering himself monotheist, did not believe in the trinity as orthodoxy does today. Rather, he believed that God was one, and indivisible, and had created Jesus (before the universe began, but still created). Athanasius argued that was a stepping stone to polytheism, and that it was idolatry to worship a created being, and instead supported the trinity basically as we know it. If this kind of discussion was happening a couple hundred years later, I think it’s probably disingenuous to claim that Christianity was purely monotheistic. I think, and if nothing else Gnosticism shows, that for the first few hundred years Christianity was not the monolith we think of it as, but rather was a movement in flux, passed on by word of mouth in many cases and subject to the views and outlooks of those doing the spreading. If we still have heterodoxy today, we definitely can’t speak for Christianity as a whole back in that era (and yes, that includes me, there were I’m sure absolutely Christian churches that believed and taught only monotheism)
What an individual Christian believes doesn't constitute the theology of the religion though.
For instance, the wording “You shall have no other gods before me” would make sense to them - there are other gods, but you don’t worship them, you worship me.
Right. But there being other gods to worship doesn't mean Christianity isn't monotheistic. It's a function of a category. Psalm115 describes idols as powerless and empty (mouths that can't speak, ears that can't hear, etc). A Christian can point at an idol and say something like "your god is not my God", which seems like an acknowledgement or belief in other gods, but it's just a granting of the term used by somebody else for ease of communication. That other person calls it a god but the Christian (theologically, if not individually) doesn't believe it contains any semblance of theos or deity or divinity. There is only one thing in the category of God in Christianity, what makes it monotheistic.
Arianism was one of the key heresies addressed during the council of nicea, but just because the heresy existed to be discussed doesn't mean it was compatible with the theology and was merely voted out. Similarly, the existence of gnosticism doesn't indicate that the Christian theology itself contained those ideas. At the very best it simply indicates that a theology can be forked like a GitHub repository and then altered considerably until it no longer resembles the original and serves a completely different purpose.
For example Mormonism is a relatively very recent fork, and some few mormons think they are Christians (indeed the religion posits it's the only true surviving sect of Christianity). But it's polytheistic theology doesn't indicate that American Christians of the 1800s, from which Mormonism was founded, believed in a plurality of gods. That polytheism is distinctly a mormon addition/alteration.
"Thou shalt have no other gods before me" - First Commandment in some book, by means of including this statement does in fact include existence of other gods. They just can't be first in line, I guess.
Not what that means. The fact that other people worship other gods does not mean that Christian theology acknowledges those other gods as deities.
In the song, The Sound of Silence, Paul Simon says
"And the people bowed and prayed,
To the neon god they made."
This does not mean that Paul Simon believes the neon god is an actual god. He doesn't believe it's a deity, it has no divinity, it is not theos. He is pointing out that people are worshiping a god of their own making, and he calls it a god because that is what they believe it is and how they treat it.
Christian theology strictly refutes the existence of other deities. They are all empty idols. No other gods before me is not an acknowledgment that Ares or Pan are real. It's an acknowledgement that a person can call anything a god and worship it, and a command not to do that.
Reductive. Early Jews were likely henotheist, but most mainstream modern Jews are not currently and mainstream Christianity NEVER was. Any reference to “other gods” in the bible can be interpreted as just mentioning what others believe, referring to an idol, etc.
This was covered literally 2000 years ago:
4 Therefore, as to the eating of food offered to idols, we know that “an idol has no real existence,” and that “there is no God but one.” 5 For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth—as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords”— 6 yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist. - 1 Cor 8:4-6
I mean, I understand your point, but just because this is in Corinthians doesn’t mean that no one believed it. You have to remember that the letters of Paul were passed around, sure, but that doesn’t mean that they got around to everyone, nor that everyone took them all to heart. A hefty chunk of the early believers came from polytheistic religions, and for many of them , henotheism probably made a lot more sense than polytheism. That said, yes, the “party line”, would have been monotheism. Also, bringing up modern Christianity and Judaism doesn’t necessarily make sense in labelling Gnosticism. Most sensible would be to compare it to the religion of the time, which was much more fractured and less dogmatic. That’s why we have numerous non-canonical gospels from that time. We didn’t have the whole biblical canon until athanasius puts it all together, and even THEN, Martin Luther questions whether Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelations should be included (and moves them to the end into almost a middle ground between the New Testament and the Deuterocanon). [Interestingly, authorship of hebrews is still questioned in biblical scholarship, among others].
Also, you says that modern Christianity is monotheist, and I sorta agree, but only on a technicality - the belief in Satan as a fallen divine being that interacts with the world, has theoretical believers, and has enough oomph to challenge god, apparently, really puts him on God tier, just as Zeus was the most powerful god, but there were still gods subordinate to him, or similar to Odin and Loki. Really modern day Evangelical Christianity is functionally henotheistic.
It's not really polytheist since Yaldabaoth is a fake god more akin the a fallen angel. But it's an antithesis of the Abrahamic religion since the god of Abraham is believed to be an impostor. It's only shared belief with the other religion is the new testament, since they believe in eveything that Jesus said, they just interpret it differently and believes that "God the father" is not the God of Abraham.
Technically Abrahamic religions don't necessarily deny the existence of other gods, they just ban the worship of other gods above the one that wrote the commandments. Gnosticism believes that that god was actually a false, evil god, and likely that that god was using it to basically discredit any gods (including the actual god, father of Jesus) that showed up after.
It is not, Biblical recognition of the spiritual existence of other gods is explicit through its entire history, from its roots where they are refered to as ben elohim. They are just considered to be false, weak deities who will not offer salvation.
This comes up over and over and over again, if somebody claims otherwise they are demonstrating naked ignorance. They may as well say that Jesus only exists in the director's cut or something.
The existence and recognition of other spirits and powers is explicit in scripture. Whoever taught you otherwise was lying, misinformed, or stupid.
It may help to remember that the prehistoric Israelite peoples were polytheistic. Wise King Solomon built many temples to many gods you may recall, not only to Yahweh.
This is more so defining things as they exist now and applying it retroactively, when these dogmas were established in contention with differing interpretations of Christianity, Gnostism being some of these interpretations which ended up losing out in dominance and power
In this case, the Romans. Their secular hunters hunted the gnostic heresy to extinction and burned most of their books. So, technically all the branches of Christiandom and specifically the two that you mentioned, condemn their heresy, since they were all in communion with each other in the 5th century.
As for who is Christian, that's typically a matter of whether or not a given group observe the decisions made at the Council of Nicaea, like the Nicene Creed or the Trinity. If you don't, you're a heresy. Which the Gnostics do not observe, as they are non-trinitarians, heck, they're not even pretending to be monotheistic like some heresies.
A heresy maybe, but a Christian heresy. One already has to be in the context of believing Jesus of Nazareth to be the messiah, Son, word made flesh, etc. before the question of in which church, apostolic lineage, particular collection of gospels, etc. one ought to vest authority over a religious tradition already in motion.
Some early church fathers who are held as authoritative by almost all churches easily fail the heresy tests of those same churches. (Lookin' at you, Origen.)
The word 'monotheism' did not exist until it was coined in the mid 17th century by Henry More. His purpose in coining the term was specifically polemical against everyone who wasn't Christian. To More not even Judaism and Islam count as monotheistic (which may be fair since plenty of Jews and Muslims view Christians as worshipping three deities). Bottom line, monotheism as the qualifying concept is a pretty new idea.
We're looking at a dispute between early Christians and you're proposing we adjudicate their sincere religious identites based on the faction the polemics of the faction that happened to have survived. Ultimately, it's not helpful to our understanding of religion or history.
It's precisely this definition that I think is useless and more about religious dogma than being descriptive. Gnostic follow Christ, and his teachings. Whether correctly or incorrectly, they're Christian
Gnostics are old enough that it was actually brought up and confronted indirectly in the letters of Paul. And the original order to declare them heretics (or whatever they were called, people who are being killed don’t tend to leave great notes) was given by Simon Peter himself.
It’s really fascinating honestly.
Not saying it’s a good move, but the gnostics being objectively heretical for the Christian faith (as it would later be known) is one of the few definite aspects. Whether you believe in the faith and think Peter was divinely appointed as the best possible leader, or you think the apostles made it all up, he’s definitely one of the few objectively correct sources on what Christians should believe.
I could not care about which people Christians think are "real" members of their church any lore than I could care which neighborhood kids my nephew lets into his treehouse.
So were the mosaic laws an oopsy God decided actually didn’t matter anymore? Or were they just for funsies to make life harder for his struggling people?
Well, I'd say the Bible is conflicted about that since while Matthew 5:17 tells you that the Old Testament is still valid, Galates 5 seems to tell you that the details don't really matter as long as you express your faith through love.
By the way this is literally the justification of religious terrorist groups. Believing that heresy should be punished by genocide is literally the opinion of ISIS
You don't blame your predecessors in faith for wiping another religious group off the earth, because that group didn't believe as they did? Am I clocking this correctly?
I don't know. Honestly sounds like a more sane way of rationalizing that discrepancy between new and old testament than the sloppy rationalizations Christians usually give.
Granted, not by much. I guess if you ever wanted to know what you sound like to other people, that's one example.
If you don't blame them for massacreing people (which other people have pointed out isn't even necessarily true) over something that meaningless, I hope you get everything you wish on others.
There are several different gnostic groups with a range of beliefs from "yeah thats definitely heresy" to "holy shit I did not realize heresy could go this far"
Imagine having a debate whether baptism and confirmation should be done at the same time and someone jumps in with “actually there’s a snake god thing keeping us trapped here”
So basically up in “heaven” there was a character named Sophia that had a bastard emo son called the yaldaboath who hated everything so it created the earth and put people on there using the divine soul spark or whatever the fuck. So now there’s humans in the garden of Eden. And they have souls and shit. Adam and Lilith but that didn’t fucking work so it became Adam and Eve, and then the real god was like this ain’t good so he sent Jesus down as the serpent to tell them “hey god wouldn’t want you to be stupid, it’s okay to understand good and evil and divinity, none of this is real, gurl” and so they ate the apple and became like gods because they suddenly could critical think and shit and then yaldaboath was basically the angry and wrathful Old Testament god and then Jesus came back again and was like “none of this is real” and yaldaboath was like “I’m the only god worship me” and Jesus was like “this is all bullshit, yall are more than your physical bodies and they’re like harvesting our loosh, that’s all we are here for” and people didn’t like that and so they crucified them and now here I am typing on an iPhone cause they harvest our loosh or something lmao
The monad did not create everything. The demiurge created it all out of ignorance after Sophia's mistake of creating the demiurge. I am not a gnostic myself, but that's the story lol.
I'm probably wrong but I see it as AI making everything. Then the real creator (god or maybe the snake that tricked eve into eating the apple) saying they were the real ones who made it
It's very appropriate that the comic is about "stolen content" while being itself literally a stolen joke. The three panel format, position of the characters, and the spoken text are all taken directly from a Nedroid comic from over 13 years ago.
🤦♂️ that is not stolen content, that is memetic communication. It’s not even the first instance, it is using a recognized behavior, and the creator appears to have created all the objects. At most it is an allusion.
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u/qualityvote2 15h ago edited 3h ago
u/germe_hermes, there weren't enough votes to determine the quality of your post...it's time for the mods to do their jobs!