You should check out David Litwa. He not only goes into the Nag Hammadi Library, but also all the various heresiological texts written by other Christian authors (eg. Origen, Ireneaus, etc) who describe the various groups now lumped together as Gnostic, and the various theological differences between them. There's more than enough evidence to distinguish the teachings of Marcion from the teachings of Simon of Samaria, from the teachings of the Naassene preacher, etc.
It's also not as though Gnostics were entirely wiped out by the 4th century. You have a lot of derivative groups like the Bogomils, Cathars, Albigensians, Patarenes, Waldenses, Anabaptists, etc, who survived for at least another thousand years afterwards. Then there are Christinanities like the Pelasgians, who (like the Hermeticists) rather than seeing the world and matter as inherently evil, denied original sin, regarded creation as inherently good and redemptive, etc.
If there were a uniform understanding of theology within Christinanity then the Catholic church and it's ideological successors wouldn't have spent a thousand years viciously murdering anyone within their own religion with a different point of view.
Similarly L Ron Hubbard took a lot of ideas from Crowley's OTO and Thelema and repacked it as Scientology. Not really that different. If you have good enough marketing abilities, or are willing to be pathologically unscrupulous and violent towards any opposition, then you too can attract hoards of gullible people into your totally made up cult du jour. It certainly worked for Christininanity 2,000 years ago.
That's because moronism was a bastardised form of Freemasonry. Joseph Smith thought that Freemasonry was an esoteric religion which simply refused to take the next step of having actual ordained priesthood. So he formed his own splinter group in which it did.
Gnostic Christinanities (plural). There are a lot of totally different traditions mashed into the same space under that heading. The idea of an "evil creator" also wasn't unique to Christinanity, as it had analogues in Judaism also.
I consider it a source of unrepentant mass delusion and genocidal violence that is so enamoured with it's own reflection that it can't recognise or take responsibility to change the abominably heinous reality of it's own character. Like I said, it's a pathological narcissistic superstition masquerading as a religion.
That may well be true, but really the only thing that distinguishes Christianity from it's Pagan contemporaries is it's fixation of an ossified narrative (in defiance of the textual inconsistencies of the source material), and it's pathological narcissism. Beyond that it has no special esoteric, theological, philosophical or moral worth to offer that isn't also present and ultimately derived from Pagan traditions.
> pagan faiths were aware that their stories were metaphors
The evidence for that is their diversity. If people took their stories and characters literally, they wouldn't have routinely changed them to suit the circumstances of their day and age.
Even the early Christians did it. The so called Ophite groups like the Naassenes are a perfect example, who equated Jesus with a whole host of dying and rising Gods from Greece, Mesopotamia and Egypt. The Freemasons do similarly, as do many other Christian esoteric orders. Even the name Jesus is itself derived from Ieso (recuperation), the daughter of Aesculapius, who's initiates were called Christoi and functioned as nurses and doctors in the hospital-temples of their day (eg. Pergamon). Not to mention the entire theological tradition of Judaism, Islam and Christianity (eg. the Trinity) are practically wholesale plagiarised from Hermeticism and NeoPlatonism.
I can't fault you there, because I have a similar relationship with other ancient myths.
In terms of transubstantiation specifically, in my view that has to do with "you are what you eat". If you choose to regard the land and it's produce as sacred gifts (as I do), then consuming products of the land like grain and meat, has an inherently sacralizing effect upon the consumer. A large part of that has to do with cultivating gratitude, and acceptance and respect for the cycle of death and rebirth which like that food we thus consume, we are all bound to in due course.
Personally I think this is where Abrahamic religion has gone off the rails. It's taken a perfectly good sentiment like respect for the sanctity of life and death, and turned it into some kind of asinine fantasy about a superhero who will supposedly save you in a fictional afterlife from being tortured for things the superhero did to you in the first place. It's retarded and totally misses the point. Instead of honouring a commonplace reality of nature and reaffirming our connection to it, it turns it into some kind of infantile delusion.
> it has not been established in this thread that I consider Biblical stories to be literally historically true.
Fair enough. However that PoV is endemic to Abrahamism, if not on a personal level of individual belief, at the institutional level and in the way that it's promoted to people both within and without the religions.
If you don't take it literally though, then it might as well be on the shelf next to Lord of the Rings, and Marvel Spiderman, rather than given some privileged place in a special category of fiction all to it's own. Other than the cultural dimension, it has no more inherent wisdom and moral worth to it than any other great work of fiction.
It's a metaphor. If there was only One God (Atum) at the beginning, how else did it procreate except through an act of masturbation? The only people who take that stuff literally are those who never matured enough to be able to distinguish fantasy from reality.
The failing of Abrahamic religion, and Christinanity in particular is that it can't adapt to pragmatic realities and accrue new wisdom which is appropriate to present circumstances, without first contorting it into the shape of the pseudohistorical fantasy novel in order to provide it with the prerequisite literary justification.
Epistemology 101 is that the map is not the territory. No matter how hard philosophers, mathematicians, etc try to create some theoretical framework, it will only ever be like a static 2d representation of a dynamic 3d object. Still useful for what it's worth, but not even remotely on the same plane of existence as the thing it's meant to describe.
The best thing about covid is being able to walk into a bank wearing a balaclava and not get shot in the face. Mind you if you didn't wear a mask, that's a possibility.How well do you think an n95 mask would stop a fart?But hey, that's why there're safe and effective (never before tested, experimental, totally not gene therapy, fingers crossed, honest) vaccines. Not so long ago it was GMO food we had to worry about. Now half the people I know are GMOs, and so is the entire hospital blood supply. Anyway, that's not nearly as important as whether I prefer the pronoun you're using, you bigot nazi fascist who wants to take away our ability to take away your ability to speak to whoever or about whatever we dislike du jour. Nya!Why is it called conspiracy "theory"? Isn't a theory a hypothesis which has been thoroughly tested and has withstood every effort to debunk it? Hmmm...The way society is going in a generation or two from now young adults will be l