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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!bonnie!akgua!mcnc!bch
From: bch@mcnc.UUCP (Byron C. Howes)
Newsgroups: net.religion,net.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Gnosticism: Is Satan an intermediary to the ultimate God or not?
Message-ID: <825@mcnc.mcnc.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 22-Sep-85 22:29:05 EDT
Article-I.D.: mcnc.825
Posted: Sun Sep 22 22:29:05 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 24-Sep-85 03:15:19 EDT
References: <8508172148.AA02946@sdcc6.ARPA> <308@pyuxn.UUCP> <2195@sdcc6.UUCP> <346@pyuxn.UUCP> <1170@wucs.UUCP> <353@pyuxn.UUCP>
Reply-To: bch@mcnc.UUCP (Byron C. Howes)
Organization: North Carolina Educational Computing Service
Lines: 22
Xref: watmath net.religion:7747 net.religion.christian:1352
Summary: 

In article <353@pyuxn.UUCP> pez@pyuxn.UUCP (Paul Zimmerman) writes:
>
>What you forgot, Steve, is that I also said that gnosticism is rife with
>the same assumption that other God whorshiping religions make. That
>assumption is that the ultimate God must be good.

(*sigh*) That simply isn't true.  Gnostics believe that the "ultimate G-d"
(your words, not mine) is beyond notions of good and evil and the sort of
direct interference that is implied by such notions.

Satan does not exist, or at least is imprecisely defined, in the context
of Gnostic belief.  There are those who espouse Satan as a facet of the
Demiurge, an idea which does clarify an inconsistant duality in christian
thought, but this Satan is not the soul-grabbing bearded nemesis of the
middle ages.

Gnostics are more concerned with the duality of the spiritual and the
material than in notions of good and evil Demiurges.
-- 

						Byron C. Howes
				      ...!{decvax,akgua}!mcnc!ecsvax!bch


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