What is the Demiurge, and how has this concept evolved across different philosophical and religious traditions?

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A divine craftsman who brings order to the cosmos.
Not a creator ex nihilo, but one who imposes form on pre-existing chaos using eternal Forms.

What exactly is the Demiurge?
 
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It's one of the answers to the "all loving, all knowing, all powerful" problem.
An interdasting one that's for sure, would a God be worthy of worship for having exist in this world they created? le demiurg is one answer to that.
 
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the story of gnosticism.webp
 
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"Ruler of this world" - for Abrahamics, it's the devil, for non-Abrahamics, it's the Old Testament God himself. A Saturnian figure that helps explain the ills of the world, essentially a deadbeat dad who was birthed by an abandoned mom (philosophy) and curses all existence.
 
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The Demiurge is the reply that esoteric schizos have for the infinite God of organized religions.
It's the same exact thing but characterized as evil, uncaring, myopic or distant depending on what sort of babble somebody is pushing. The entire idea being about subverting the demiurge is one form or another.
It is also sometimes used as a philosophical tool by those trying to separate philosophy from religion.
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Soon after the advent of Christianity, it became apparent to those early Christians that far from making the world a better place, Christianity seemed to make it even worse everywhere their fellow Christians went. It was difficult to reconcile with the message they were taught. This eventually resulted in some coming to the conclusion that they were deceived... but not only deceived, also deceived by the very deity they were supposed to worship. Acknowledging that this deity was still the creator of everything and indeed of man himself, they rejected the idea that he was loving, wholesome, or worthy of worship of any sort. He was a false god who takes credit he has not earned. They searched for hidden meaning in Jesus's words, they borrowed heavily from many mystery religions that predate Christianity, and they decided he was actually the demiurge that always intended to mislead them. That there was a truer god, one that Jesus had tried to put them in touch with.

Christianity stomped these heresies out everywhere it found them, and they didn't really spread much. So this stuff was sprouting up all on its own, over and over again, invented independently.
 
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ChefBourgeoisie said:
Soon after the advent of Christianity, it became apparent to those early Christians that far from making the world a better place, Christianity seemed to make it even worse everywhere their fellow Christians went. It was difficult to reconcile with the message they were taught. This eventually resulted in some coming to the conclusion that they were deceived... but not only deceived, also deceived by the very deity they were supposed to worship. Acknowledging that this deity was still the creator of everything and indeed of man himself, they rejected the idea that he was loving, wholesome, or worthy of worship of any sort. He was a false god who takes credit he has not earned. They searched for hidden meaning in Jesus's words, they borrowed heavily from many mystery religions that predate Christianity, and they decided he was actually the demiurge that always intended to mislead them. That there was a truer god, one that Jesus had tried to put them in touch with.

Christianity stomped these heresies out everywhere it found them, and they didn't really spread much. So this stuff was sprouting up all on its own, over and over again, invented independently.
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This is how those early Jewish Christians felt when the temple was ruined and they kept getting defeated by the Romans; it really was the "apocalypse" for them. Other Jews continued the fight, and that eventually turned into Islam. Marcion creates the first Christian Bible without the Old Testament, lamenting that the Old Testament God was the demiurge and that he wanted to start fresh and create a new religion without the stink of the Jewish demiurge, who was obviously different from the older Levantine/Mesopotamian influenced one; the new god is clearly Greco-Roman/Persian inspired instead. Marcion then fails to persuade the church through bribery, allegedly, so the church decided to compile one in retaliation, adding the Old Testament as "canon".
 
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Ethiopians imagine their gods as black and snub-nosed; Thracians blue-eyed and red-haired. But if horses or lions had hands, or could draw and fashion works as men do, horses would draw the gods shaped like horses and lions like lions, making the gods resemble themselves.
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Xenophones
 
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An uncaring god that doesn't care about its creation?

Too lazy to even draw more issues of Sonichu?
 
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OP, if you're interested in gnosticism, I'd recommend April D. DeConick's The Gnostic New Age.

Gnosticism developed in a time when religions around the Mediterranean and Near East conceived of humans as nothing more than slaves to the gods. Our purpose according to this framework is to simply serve them. The divine hierarchy was a mirror of human hierarchy; the strong oppress the weak and force them into servitude. The mass killing and enslavement characteristic of ancient warfare, and the brutality of everyday existence (keep in mind that slavery was extremely common, and even non-slaves were at the mercy of their rulers; gnostics weren't just complaining that they couldn't get pussy, but that they and their families could be raped, enslaved, or killed without recourse), appeared cosmically justified. Gnostics basically accepted this framework, but had also had or sought a transcendent mystical experience with a loving God beneficent to humanity, which they felt was superior in some way to the gods who'd established their social order. So the creator or creators of the physical universe, with all its evident brutality, must have sinned against the One by establishing this way of things. The term "Demiurge," meaning "Architect," was borrowed from Plato, who in the Timaeus uses the term for the god who's moved by erotic love to create the universe as an artistic representation of the beauty of another god (called the "Paradigm"). Incidentally, Plato was a polytheist, and Platonists usually read the story as an allegory or simplification of the process by which many gods together created the universe -- likely Plato was not positing the existence of a specific god who existed solely to create the universe, and another god whose purpose was to be its model. But gnostic mythology gives this another spin. Their mythology, which also surely originated as an allegory even if some later took it literally, also has the universe as the product of eros. The goddess Wisdom ("Sophia," which is grammatically feminine in Greek), attempted to understand the One, which is analagous to a sexual act (to understand something you have to internalize it, "take it in" to yourself, like a woman takes a man into herself). But the One (who is All, and equivalent to the sum of everything, called the "Pleroma" -- "fullness") can't, by its nature, be encompassed by a single principle (wisdom). So Sophia's action is analagous to rape: the first sin. The product of Sophia's pregnancy was an abomination, something that shouldn't exist, and expelled from the perfection of the Pleroma. While Sophia herself, the principle of wisdom, was capable of understanding her sin and repenting, the abomination took after its "father" and attempted to be a new Pleroma in the godless void ("Kenoma," or "emptiness"), which is how the physical universe comes to exist. Our God thinks he is the God but hasn't ever known the true God; he's blind in this way. The universe we see around is is a distorted mirror of a higher reality, and the "gods" emanated by the universe's creator are likewise imperfect reflections of the true gods emanated by the One. This explained the problem of evil and why evil people seemed to rule the world.
 
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Divine Power said:
A divine craftsman who brings order to the cosmos.
Not a creator ex nihilo, but one who imposes form on pre-existing chaos using eternal Forms.

What exactly is the Demiurge?
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From my reading/understanding, The Demiurge is "God"/The Architect/Order/Design/Masculine. While it's opposite is "Tiamat/Lilith"/The Oracle/Chaos/Creation/Feminine. One is not over the other but are actually a binary complimentary in the creation of this reality. The Garden of Eden was the ideal form of reality until an outside parasitic force "The Serpent"/Satan/Sauron/Destruction/Anti-Life/The Nothing/Cthulu interfered
 
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Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
Thanks
I still don't get it
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I used to be interested in gnosticism but never had an ascended master to teach me instead opting for skimming wiki and other articles while on the toilet. So take what I say with a grain of salt.

Part 1. There's nothing and then theres the monad which is everything. The monad then created concepts.

Rather then the pagan religion concept of this is the goddess of love, this is the god of harvest, etc they just took out the personified part and just addressed it as concepts: as you see in the comic concept of silence, concept of word, concept of pleasure, etc. I guess this would be what's referred to as neo-platoism idea coming from plates theory of form. These concepts then came together to form more concepts (for example off the top of my head: experience + wisdom = hindsight. I'm sure some austimo in a ancient forum wrote up the ancient equivalent of a wiki Fandom page detailing thousands of different combinations to explain all concepts).

Part 2. Wisdom (aka greek power name sophia) did something very unwisdom like and created on her own even it's not her right to do such a thing. This seems like a recurring motif in many myths and theologies. It takes two to tango, man (and women) can't create a offspring on their own. Because of this mistake she created the demiurge a entity born from ignorance.

The demiurge is created, looks around in a blind state and says "they're is no other god but I". He is either seen as a being of pure ignorance or a being of ignorance and malice. He then further created our world, the inhabitants of our world and us and tells us he is the supreme and to worship him. He enforces this with his archons who keep us trapped in the matrix.

Even though his creation is a mistake and by extention we are a mistake we all still contain a piece of the divine.

Jesus is a messenger from the divine realm. He came into the demiurge creation to tell us to wake up from this illusion we live in, escape the trap and rejoin back into the divine.

If this still doesn't makes sense then just watch The Truman Show.

Jim Carrey = all of us
The show = our world
The guy in the beret who designed the show = demiurge
The friends, families and other actors = archon
The people who break into the set = well not Jesus but similar concept can be drawn
 
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