Yaldabaoth's People

[pompe]

I'm not exactly a sucker for classic education, but I do believe that there is a certain amount of Source Books one should read in one's life in order to be able to form an own opinion about what the world is like. Anyway, in order to be a bit more updated on the religious source material for the West I've started to go through Augustine's City of

Comments

[mmcirvin]

Coincidentally, I was just thinking about how 20th century scientific cosmology was unusually prone to produce the kind of researcher who clings to a pet idea decades after its generally-agreed-on disconfirmation, becoming increasingly paranoid and insisting that opponents are ganging up for political or religious reasons.

Maybe there's a common thread here; maybe alienation and extreme Big Picture focus go hand in hand.

[pompe]

I guess that's true. I mean, look at all the people who believe they have Big Answers to Big Things, like what the future's going to be like and what ideology is the ultimately supreme. That's a recipe for alienation. Maybe it can be spotted behaviourally already at a fairly young age. If the person ends up to be a Gnostic fascinated by cumbersome cosmology, a Singularian Extraordinaire or a Marxist Splinter Group Member might not matter as much.

[mmcirvin]

That also reminds me of this interview with James Tiptree, Jr. in the back of one of the Women of Wonder anthologies, in which the interviewer asked her if she thought men and women had different styles of writing, and she cited something by Rebecca West that said men and women have different styles of bad writing. That when women write badly they become excessively focused on interior minutiae, and when male writers go bad they fall into grandiose cosmic crackpottery and rant about enormous world systems.

Obviously we can all think of some exceptions to this rule; Ayn Rand seems essentially masculine by this classification.

[pompe]

Yet another insult to male-kind. ,-)

[onyxrising]

It has been my experience, at least on this side of the pond, that many Christians haven't really read much on their own religion.
I remember in high school in the crazy fundie town I originally lived in, I was one of two non-Christian teenagers. Myself and Elisheba (the town's token Jewish girl) were more familiar with many of the points of Christian theology than the Christian kids, simply because we'd read source material and they hadn't. (Some of them didn't know what the holy Trinity was despite going to church every Sunday, and fervently believing anything preacher told them. No, I'm not joking. Elisheba and myself, by contrast, had actually read parts of the Bible.) Their parents typically weren't much better read on the subject.
I'm not sure how different the Christian population is over there, but here many of ours are not particularly well read on their primary holy books, much less the lesser known ones.
By the way, which Lost Gospels are you reading. Are any of the ones you've read actually worth picking up?

[mmcirvin]

My experience with assorted evangelicals, Pentecostalists and dispensationalists in Virginia was that their Bible study leaned heavily on commentary and exegesis that made things considerably more pat than the often puzzling actual text did. I remember getting into an argument about the authorship of the Gospels in which the poor kid I was arguing with used the endpaper commentary in a Gideon pocket New Testament as evidence.

[onyxrising]

Ours never tried to use the end papers. They just got flustered when we brought up things they weren't familiar with in their books, and fell back on, "The Devil can quote scripture for his own purpose."

I heard the latter so many times, and yet not a one of them was aware that the quote is from William Shakespeare- not any of the books of the Bible.

[pompe]

Nag Hammadi contained over fifty ancient texts. The other book I found has forty - some are duplicates, though.

Thomas is rather good, I think. And short-ish. Actually a fair deal of them are well, more interesting than good. The Acts of Thecla isn't exactly high lit but interesting anyway. The Gospel of Judas Iscariot is another interesting and odd one. The Peter Apocalypse is another notable.