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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   21100 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026

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It's not conceptually different then believing we are inherently flawed due to original sin in fact it basically is this except they view the sin as being different and invert the garden of Eden story.

Leaving aside the fact that 'original sin' in the sense you seem to mean it is a peculiarly Roman Catholic concept, yeah, there's a huge difference between that and having been maliciously incarnated by a demiurge. Actually I thought for a moment about how to illustrate just how radically-different those two things are but came up blank.

Most Gnostics don't/didn't believe we were maliciously incarnated by a demiurge. The Cathars did syncretizing the concept of a demiurge with Satan and other aspects of the Catholic church. The Nag Hammadi creation texts and the extant Gnostic religions have a much more complicated cosmology and a concept much closer to original sin in the sense that in some of them the material world becomes irrevocably tainted after the rape of eve but not before. In others the world is created bad as an act of rebellion or irrevocably tainted because it's creation was not authorized by God and Yahweh lacked the authority. In some Yahweh is evil, in some he is simply fallible and overcome by lust or pride. and in some the world is created by other entities. But it's a very broad concept I think we have something like five Gnostic creation myths of which we can read the full texts of.

Anyway Gnosticism is a broad category which is a lot more than Cathars, and I wish people on the internet would say Cathars because most of the common internet use of "Gnosticism" is essentially just referring to them.

I agree that there is world of difference between sentiments like "Nobody is perfect" and "we all have the capacity for evil", and the sort of aggressive nihilism that seems to permeate a lot of these movements.

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