Being a Gnostic Christian, and believing that we all have an internal access to God, I would say that my God is male as he is being interpreted by my male mind. Your internal God will be female as you can only interpret with your female mind.

This may have been well known to the ancients and that may be why they showed their Gods to be androgynous.

The concepts of God are indeed abused as all that has been said and is known of God has come from human mouths and minds.

That first clip shows where our delusions come from.

Regards

DL 

Thanks for the interest.

In brief.

I have no favorite gospel. To me none should be taken literally as all  FMPOV were written to stimulate though and dialog and they all come from Egypt and Sumer. Gilgamesh I think highlights this. Many Gnostics like the Gospel of Jesus and

Real Christians tend to hate me. That is likely why when Constantine bought the Catholic church, they killed many of us and burned most of our scriptures. They left some around though.

I believe in Jesus as an archetypal good man. Not as a God or a part of the foolish Trinity concept that Constantine forced down the churches throat for his own self-aggrandisement.

The Godhead I know in a nutshell.
I was a skeptic till the age of 39.
I then had an apotheosis and later branded myself a Gnostic Christian naturalist.
Gnostic Christian because I exemplify this quote from William Blake.

“Both read the Bible day and night, But thou read'st black where I read white.”

This refers to how Gnostics tend to reverse, for moral reasons, what Christians see in the Bible. We tend to recognize the evil ways of O T God where literal Christians will see God’s killing as good. Christians are sheeple where Gnostic Christians are goats.
This is perhaps why we see the use of a Jesus scapegoat as immoral, while theists like to make Jesus their beast of burden. An immoral position.

During my apotheosis, something that only lasted 5 or 6 seconds, the only things of note to happen was that my paradigm of reality was confirmed and I was chastised to think more demographically. What I found was what I call a cosmic consciousness. Not a new term but one that is a close but not exact fit.

I recognize that I have no proof. That is always the way with apotheosis.
This is also why I prefer to stick to issues of morality because no one has yet been able to prove that God is real and I have no more proof than they for the cosmic consciousness.

The cosmic consciousness is not a miracle working God. He does not interfere with us save when one of us finds it. Not a common thing from what I can see. It is a part of nature and our next evolutionary step.

I tend to have more in common with atheists who ignore what they see as my delusion because our morals are basically identical. Theist tend not to like me much as I have no respect for literalists and fundamentals and think that most Christians have tribal mentalities and poor morals.

I am rather between a rock and a hard place but this I cannot help.

I am happy to be questioned on what I believe but whether or not God exists is basically irrelevant to this world for all that he does not do, and I prefer to thrash out moral issues that can actually find an end point. The search for God is never ending when you are of the Gnostic persuasion. My apotheosis basically says that I am to discard whatever God I found, God as a set of rules that is, not idol worship it but instead, raise my bar and seek further.

My apotheosis also showed me that God has no need for love, adoration or obedience. He has no needs. Man has dominion here on earth and is to be and is the supreme being.

Regards
DL

Peggotty

Let me give you a bit on Constantine and how the West ended up embracing Christianity’s God of war.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WD0eSqFJ7J4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA_SSpQDpl4&feature=related

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“In other words there is no bible.”

I agree. It was originally just a consolidation of wisdom saying from other older religions. It was to be a book that was not to be read literally. It, like all Gospels, including the Gnostic ones, was written as a tool to open discussions about God. Not point to one.

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“I don’t know what you mean by cosmic consciousness after your apotheosis can you put it into words.”

Perhaps an analogy is the best for this.
Think of your consciousness as a P C. Think of the cosmic consciousness as a main frame full of independent P Cs like yourself with full freedom to surf the mainframe.

The difference between what you input there and here is that there, when you communicate with another P C, you automatically have all the information that put the others ideas into his head and the truth of it is plain to see.
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“In terms of humans being ‘supreme’ I imagine you mean by that we are at the top of the food chain or are you implying that we are evolving into something other than we are now.”

Top of the food chain yes but also the top of the thinking chain and we should not kowtow to invisible or imaginary Gods. FMPOV, God has always been man. No one but a man has ever put words to the will of God. That God was never able to speak without man. So to speak. The Godhead or cosmic consciousness can only be accessed by us and cannot speak for its self.

Our next evolutionary step is to the cosmic consciousness. In that we have no choice. It is a natural transition.

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“You say you are concentrating your studies in the direction of morals do you mean that humans can evolve in this area when there doesn’t seem to be much evidence.”

I do not so much study morals as try to get the religious to implement them and discard their genocidal son murdering God. They do not realize that human sacrifice and punishing the innocent instead of the guilty is immoral.

We do not need to develop morals. What we have is good enough. It is just a matter of implementation.

Check this clip and note that man’s first moral law is shown as being centered on others while the first religious law is God’s self-centered, place no God above me.

FMPOV, morality should be how we treat others and not our own selves.
Certainly we have to survive to do so so some self-centeredness we cannot help. Survival is not morality though and the survival of the common should always be before the survival of any individual. Even a God.

http://blog.ted.com/2008/09/17/the_real_differ/

Regards
DL

Given what you are saying, why load yourself up with christianity at all? You're not really a follower of nicene jesus. You seem to be at once pantheist, jewish and hindu. There's nothing really locked in about what you believe. I'm curious as to what you consider to be a 'godhead' particularly given the fact you say we are equipped to be as good as we can be and we are destined ultimately, to be gods/godlike in some way in the future perhaps as part of the evolution of morality?

Do you love jesus DL, in that particular way? If not, surely you could alter your nomenclature? Maybe you follow gnostic judaism? Or do you respect jesus and embrace the gentle teachings that are common to gnostic doctrines, those that philosophically eschew the later coalescence of weirdness and bitterness that became Augustinian catholicism?

I don't really buy into any of these things myself as as a devoted skeptic but I'm supportive of this sort of accepting and open theism. Some people are obviously 'spiritual' in some way that is closed to me and these people should be able to make their meaning of the mysteries of life. Be tough on some one with that sort of inner 'feel' to be locked into a universe of dead gluons. To me the material-ness of the universe makes my awareness all the more profound but that's me. 

It's better if religious doctrines are inclusive, positive about human goodness and benign rather than violently judgmental and driven by cultural bigotries. 

You treat others like how you treat yourself. I think it is a false dichotomy to think of it any other way. As the saying goes, "hurt people hurt people". Do you see that?

I call myself a Gnostic Christian because I use the Christian bible as well as Gnostic writings to form my opinions. This is basically a cultural decision because I live in a Christian culture. If I lived in the East I would likely be a Gnostic Hindu or Gnostic of some other religion. As I said, all scriptures FMPOV were written just to engage the mind. Not lead to any particular God.

Jesus is no more important to me than any other prophet or Rabbi. Wisdom can be found in all of the various religions depending on how you read their works. With the bible, there is much wisdom but thanks to Chrsitianity reversing the older interpretations, to get the wisdom, you have to basically reverse it back to the original.

"As a skeptic I'm not spiritual at all, I interpret all those feelings others might call spirituality as relating to my mind."

As it should. That is where all information is processed and stored.

As I stated above, the only reason I believe in the Godhead is because of my apotheosis. Without it, I would likely still be a skeptic and not hold any belief in the unseen.

Regards

DL

Thanks Greatest, looks like Constantine followed the route of all massive egos he chose the subject and then talked about himself! A clever tactic to delude the Christian soldiers in his army and the historians by the looks of it.

Is there any chance you may be History Smurf or are you ‘keeping mum’ on that.
 

Just wondering whether you were one of Old Seer’s crew of Smurfs, Engineer Smurf, Psycho Smurf etc (he being Bible Smurf) and you possibly History Smurf?

There are similarities in your posts both of you having the idea that man is God for a kickoff.