Why 4channers are obssed with gnosticism?

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Waifu Days said:
It's deep, man. You wouldn't get it.
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It truly is.
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Hardline Traditionalist said:
AFAIK, other religions need to bend themselves into pretzels to justify it.
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Not really?...

Christianity teaches that God wants everyone to strive toward virtue, but will not interfere with free will unless He has a reason to. One person is allowed to be a scumbag, while another person is given the chance to either intervene or be emotionally driven to do some act of good to offset the first person's scumminess. It's easier to do the right thing when evil is all around you.

By increasing one's virtue (through prayer, fasting, acts of charity/love) one takes on the energies/activities of God, including His goodness. Therefore, the stuggle for virtue continues past the grave, as God is infinite and the time it would take to approach His goodness is endless.

People blame God for allowing the holocaust, but refuse to thank Him for stopping the holocaust.

Dharmic religions don't believe in an omnipotent god and regard evil as a natural force that either needs to be offset or transcended. Like Christianity, free will isn't overstepped (for the most part), however the mechanism for the increase of virtue is not as well established. The one exception is Brahmanic Hinduism, but they take a roughly similar stance to other monotheistic religions regarding evil.

Pagan religions also either don't believe in an omnipotent god, or believe their gods to be evil, or don't even believe in morality the same way we do. A South American cannibal is not going to look at the problem of evil the same way a Westerner does.

Chinese religions (I'm really just talking about the philosophy of Confucianism and Taoism, and not the spiritual aspects) don't view evil the same way we do either. Confucians believe that evil is transgression against the social order, while Taoists have a somewhat similar approach to Christianity where people are permitted to fall into evil only if it results in the betterment of others.

The only religion that would struggle with the problem of evil is Islam, but I don't have a clear grasp of their approach to free will, and I'm not interested in reading Ibn Sina to understand how they interpret Plato's approach to virtue.
 
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HyperboreanRightsActivist said:
free will
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God is omniscient and knows every single choice you'll make. Since it is knowable, we could say that all your actions are predetermined, and sine God doesn't interfere, you will act the way you were destined to. Therefore, there is no free will.
HyperboreanRightsActivist said:
Dharmic religions <...>
Pagan religions <...>
Chinese religions <...>
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You got me here, I should've just said "christianity" instead of "other religions", cause other religions often don't even state that God is all-loving(or omnipotent) and gnosticism(by which I mean christian gnosticism) is only relevant for christianity.
HyperboreanRightsActivist said:
Islam
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I think muslims typically use the same justifications as christians. e.g. "You need evil to know what good is" as well as "Finite suffering in life is nothing compared to infinite bliss in Heaven".
Absolutego said:
He had one rule, is he the bad guy for giving us the sovereignty to break it, or are we just really fucking stupid?
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He made us stupid in the first place and he didn't remove the serpent even though he knew that it would tempt Eve. Makes it look like it was all according to his plan.
 
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Hardline Traditionalist said:
No, because we're talking about events in the past. Even if he had free will, he wouldn't be able to change the actions he had already performed.
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Well that's a different philosophical question because God is beyond time and space. If you had a time machine, but refused to change the past, would this mean that you're conceding to the flow of fate and free will didn't exist in the past?
 
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