Dan Brown is just the famous and perhaps the least competent academically qualified person to link Gnosticism with Early Christian theology. The popular notion is that gnosticism is a Christian heresy, that was suppressed and/or attacked an ultimately eliminated in conflict, irenic and not so much, during the early church. In my recent class on the New Testament, we were taught about the ideas of one of the leading authorities on Gnosticism, Birger Pearson who argues something different. Gnosticism was not a Christian heresy. It was a completely separate religion which in fact predated Christianity.

Gnosticisms primary beliefs include:

1. Belief in an overarching monadic God.
2. Creation was not performed by the overarching deity but by a demiurge, a lesser (demonic) deity. Material creation, being ruled and controlled by mostly demonic entities is not good.
3. The goal for the eternal mortal essences is to escape and transcend the material creation. The secret teaching and knowledge (gnosis) is how this is the method by which this is accomplished.

This is a different religion. Gnosticism was very syncretic. It brought in different and other religious traditions into their mythologies for their purposes.

Some striking differences between Christian stories. The archon (demiurge) creating and in charge of Earth was known as the “Child of Chaos”, the Fool, and/or the Blind God. Similarities between this and either the Hebrew unnamed God or the Christian Trinity are not slight. In the Garden of Eden story, in gnostic tradition, the villain of the piece was the God of the garden and the hero? Satan, the serpent.

Early Christian theologians contended against gnosticism, but not as a Christian heresy but as a competing but different religion.

Good morning.

1. Razor advice.
2. Capacity for aid.
3. Hmmm. I had thought one of the striking differences in cycling and other sports is that the fans celebrate a 12th place finish for their guy. I had thought that a good thing.
4. Pain.
5. More on pain.
6. Freedom, taxes and the welfare state.
7. Terror on the Moscow subway system.
8. HRW and the Nazi claim.
9. Mr Pullman’s latest book.
10. A discussion of a political cartoon.
11. Recess.
12. Masculine beauty and a study.
13. A film.

Good morning.

1. In the President’s words … apparently backtracking is a theme.
2. That’s what we need in a recession.
3. Tanning beds and the new bill.
4. 10 books meme noticed … at Volokh.
5. Ice.
6. Power napping.
7. Faith … and the stage.
8. Fixie at Wal-Mart?
9. A very cool biking video, dreams of the ordinary man or something like that.
10. Handouts continue … deficits are no concern I guess.
11. Those Healthcare lawsuits.
12. Kiss your (retirement) money good bye.
13. Talking race.
14. On the phase in … and avoiding the obvious point that the really onerous parts of the bill needed to be postponed until after certain election cycles were past.

Good … afternoon.

1. Independence day.
2. On being a foreigner.
3. A Gitmo grad.
4. From our Government motors.
5. Considering Sophocles.
6. While I too think I “know what you mean“, I think what you don’t mean is what is true, i.e., safety is not possible.
7. Salvadore Dali-bike.
8. How to shut up a professional ethicist … sort of.
9. The “GOP” is “deeply unserious” about addressing … hmm, I’d say that’s an unnecessary qualification. Politicians are unserious about most matters, healthcare being just one of them.
10. The “tea leaves” are not hard to understand. The missing piece is that cricket races (polls) are almost universally meaningless.
11. On the defence of detainee lawyers.
12. We need more of this.
13. But what we will get is this sort of thing … in healthcare … in spades, which has already happened in that Congress has exempted itself and their aides from the healthcare legislation.
14. 64 “teams” … who will win?
15. Just say no? For those who claim this HC bill will not affect healthcare innovation … how will a “medical device tax” spur innovation and improvements?

Good morning.

1. I think you might need to be a subscriber to read this … but it is quite good.
2. Following my predilection for sidestepping the main point of a piece … the phrase “deeply patronizing” jumped out at me. I think the adjective “deeply” here is meaningless and inaccurate. Besides that, the attitude is more than likely “shallowly” patronizing at best, i.e., just based on surface assumptions and casual expectations.
3. Huh? So … who is the guy on the left? Lenin? Freud?
4. Inflation and a debate, a missing piece possibly in this list.
5. This is not unrelated to the above.
6. Remarks on the CBO estimates of the healthcare bill. 
7. Economics and legislation.
8. New? A “New” nuclear option? Huh!? This is what nuclear proponents (mostly oddly enough on the right) have been advocating for two decades.
9. Speaking of healthcare.
10. From pro-choice to pro-life in a pro-choice community.
11. Bill of attainder?
12. Obama keeping his word … not.
13. It will be interesting to see if those who support the stimulus object to this … which is due to the stimulus bill.
14. A motor.

Good morning.

1. Pessimism (here and here) and Optimism (here) in the wake of the healthcare passing.
2. Loneliness and humility.
3. Climate or weather news.
4. Testable predictions … what are your predictions (testable).
5. One here.
6. On planet liberal … apparently selling crap to the government is free markets. Geesh.
7. This would be a story to dig into … in my copious free time.
8. Shame, a quality entirely lacking in the beltway set.
9. On abortion and the healthcare bill.
10. An abhorrent trend.
11. And the big lie in the healthcare mix.
12. Why the legislative victory will likely be Pyrrhic.

Career.

• Thirty Years that Shook Physics: The Story of Quantum Theory … decided my major.
• Personal Knowledge … more recently set the stage for my thinking on philosophy of science.

Religion

• Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings locked in my falling away from the church.
• Chesterton’s Orthodoxy brought me back.
• Lossky’s The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, Evagrius Ad Monachos, St. John Cassian’s Conferences, and Metropolitian John Zizioulas’ Communion and Otherness sent me packing smartly across the Bosphorus.

Politics

• Solzhenitsyn’s addresses (The Solzhenitsyn Reader) and Jouvenel’s political trilogy (On Power, Sovereignty, and Pure theory of Politics) form the basis of and anchor my political thinking.
• Huxley’s Brave New World and Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom describe the modern world.
• Chantal Delsol’s The Unlearned Lessons Of the Twentieth Century: An Essay On Late Modernity is very very good as well.

Good morning.

1. Civility and trade.
2. Friday’s prediction. “worst aspects of market and socialism” Words … we will apparently now be living by.
3. Adultery.
4. Clinton in Russia regarding Iran.
5. The coming healthcare battles … will only get worse.
6. On hell.
7. Of milk and meat and Christian education.
8. Considering the Prayer of St. Ephrem.
9. A forest and a highway.
10. Yet another scientific study noted which discovers the obvious.
11. Sarcasm in the wake of the healthcare passage. Or is it irony, I can never figure out what the difference between those two.
12. Maybe that healthcare bill will lose its teeth.
13. And it has to stand up in court as well.
14. Imagine that, dishonesty from the President. 
15. Darwin and teleology.

Good morning.

1. That FOIA thing, with some numbers.
2. Change … or not.
3. St. Cyril on the Lord’s prayer.
4. Climate.
5. Flight.
6. Art.
7. Healthcare and the Jedi younglings.
8. Budget and the latest version of the bill … and a big lie.
9. Abandoned churches in Russia, a photo-montage. (HT: Paul Gregory Alms)
10. Campaign finance.
11. Attitudes in academia? Counter-intuitive?
12. An Aussie judge strikes out.

Good morning.

1. Career choices in the UK.
2. Genocides.
3. No. Charity does not imply a power hierarchy.
4. Enforced charity however, does incur disgruntlement.
5. Three more for St. Patrick’s day, here (a defence) and here (some history) and here (Irish jokes).
6. Eucharist and confession.
7. Some economic indicators … including “attractive wait staff.”
8. When you start off by misreading … going from there means straw men are afoot.
9. HUD for the rest of us.
10. Russian elections.
11. Hitler and Pakistan.a
12. Gooder English.
13. Fer the kiddies … or not.
14. Next comes Evagrius, then Cassian … then swim in the Bosphorus? 😉

Good morning.

1. For a site that depends on logical arguments … failing to think logically is a big problem. The statement “slavery was/is not evil because of cruelty” does not depend or imply the statement “cruelty is not evil.” The statement means slavery is evil without cruelty (more accurately does not depend on the evil of cruelty to be evil), but does not imply that cruelty is not also evil.
2. Oh … Hell. 
3. Comparisons of comfort.
4. Truth to power.
5. Weather implies climate change? Only when it fits the rhetoric I guess.
6. What if? Hmmph. That shouldn’t be a question. It isn’t.
7. Ride a bike.
8. Heh. Snort.
9. Yes they do. I don’t think there should be any question about that, although I don’t think “during a recession” is a necessary qualifier.
10. I hate those “compelling life story” rhetorical techniques … so when they backfire … people should notice.
11. For St. Patrick’s day.
12. More transparent administration, is measurably much less transparent. Color me unsurprised.

In many cultures in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world there is a strikingly different approach to sexuality and the interactions between men and women. These cultures feature an emphasis on honor and shame as well as well as being on the other side of the individual/collective axis from those us in the modern West. If one takes a spectrum of human cultures and measured them by a metric which weighs their emphasis on individual vs group responsibility and sensibility one would find US and Western cultures today leaning toward the side of individuality and the individual whereas these Middle Eastern cultures were would be found at the other end, in which a person does not weigh his own advantage before that of his particular group (in this instance the primary group was the family). There are two reasons why this is important. First is, that many of us find the Bible, a book authored within the context of an honor/shame/collective culture is important. And furthermore the honor/shame/collective culture like the Middle East of the 1st century, comprises 70% of the worlds population today. Most of those of us reading this essay live in the western minority. If you think the liberal/conservative or left/right divide in the US is difficult to cross … it pales before this larger cultural  division.

Features of the culture in which the separation of men and women is predominant are discussed in great detail elsewhere and by others. For the following, I’m going to concentrate on just one aspect of differences between the West and the h/s/c cultures. Most h/s/c cultures typically arranged themselves specifically in ways that tried to make it impossible for men and women to come into contact in a situation where their interpersonal relationship/contact might lead to a social unacceptable sexual relationship. In part a working assumption there is that people in these situations do not have the will power to actually resist such temptation. Now from the point of view the Western outsider there are a plethora of very disadvantageous features to this particular arrangement. For the point being made below … these perceived negative aspects are, at least at first glance, not relevant. What is relevant is the comparison made between our porn drenched Western culture and theirs in that the sight of the hint of anything at all about woman’s figure or form his highly eroticized in their culture where in ours the saturation has desensitised us. And it is this relative sensitivity to the erotic is that which I wish to use as a analogy to compare the high (hierarchical) churches to the low churches in their differing treatment of liturgy and sacrament to the restrained/free sexuality in the other two cultures.

In h/s/c cultures one finds manner, clothing, and interactions between the sexes in society highly constrained. In high liturgical/hierarchical churches one finds the manner, clothing, and interactions in liturgy similarly constrained. The west can be described as jaded and deadened to stimuli in comparison to the h/s/c cultures with respect to sexual imagery and erotically charged situations. Similarly, in prior conversations for example on Evangel, modern American protestants are comparatively blind to the sacred, as what was Holy was defined as something of an internal state of mind not a ontological property which can attached to a place (such as the Bush in Exodus). My point is that a sense of the sacred and a sensitivity to Holiness is heightened by similar practices. One might compare the segregation of the sexes in Middle Eastern cultures to the wall or screen separating between the servers, deacons, and priests and the congregation in the Eastern rites.

Good morning.

1. A fact vs myth for the healthcare debate.
2. A word from the desert.
3. Wind farming and climate.
4. Gay bashing and standards.
5. Conservative.
6. Watching the Druze.
7. Lance Armstrong.
8. Prayer.
9. Geting it backwards.
10. The courts.
11. Multipliers.
12. CS Lewis and St. Silouan.
13. An interview on Eric Rohmer and his films.
14. Talking about liberty.

Good morning.

1. Selection of a sort.
2. If those stats on age refer to the “brake/accel” issue, the problem is not mechanical.
3. A view of Mr Obama which makes some sense … but see this in that context.
4. Chesterton.
5. Repentance.
6. The rehabilitation of US Grant … is that it? To keep Mr Reagan off the $50 bill?
7. Very sweet.
8. On war.
9. Hmm.
10. Smile, your feel good story for the day.
11. Image, archetype and propaganda … 
12. Girls.
13. And some old advice that remains good.

Good morning.

1. Bonhoeffer on technology.
2. The Democrats getting press, more here.
3. Undermining public education by the Admin, a feature not a bug?
4. Candidates and boxes.
5. Wind bottles and power.
6. Of metric, model, and stimulus.
7. Church and culture.
8. Trust and reputation.
9. The medieval warm period … and a correlation (which is not causation … but that doesn’t mean it isn’t either).
10. A long conversation on morals and war.
11. Freedom of speech and the word ‘nigger’.