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I'm not a Christian of any sort, but I will say this... the idea that a good god is trying to free us from an evil god makes more sense to me than the idea that there is only one god, this god is good, and this god also gives infants horrible diseases on a regular basis cause of muh free will or something.
At the end of the day though, the good god / evil god dichotomy doesn't make much sense to me either. It feels emotionally resonant in a way that is deep but still somehow superficial compared to true depth. It too is a bit brittle like the rantings of a crazy homeless man. Like Revelations.
The truth, I think, is something deeper than any of those Christian ideas... Christianity has nice symbolism and it points to some important true things, however.
Yes. It's more coherent to me that the highest God wants to allow the Demiurge to have some free will, and that human's original sin is entering the Demiurge's world to experience, I don't know, unique worldly things. But the Demiurge being a lower being, is not omnipotent or omniscient, or perfectly just, and so his world is flawed and has at least some malicious elements. This seems to be the gist of some of the earliest Christian theology in this vein that I can find.
This is also why God is absent today. The Demiurge is either dead (was mortal and got old, something else killed him, the higher God got sick of him and destroyed him but not his creation), or bored; the higher God won't lower himself to come here again.
I think the truth is better uncovered by this theology.
In a lot of Gnostic cosmologies the big G God doesn't act very much in the universe. Other entities do to show his grace such as Sophia and Jesus. I'm curious if you've read the Nag Hammadi texts or the gospel of Thomas?
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