Gatorubet
Loathing All Things Georgia
This is not an unimportant point. The - I dunno - obviousness of that line of thinking - is what became the bedrock of Gnostic thinking.kinch;2011370; said:
The difficulty reconciling the Old Testament God - with his anthropological anger and pettiness and vindictiveness - with the New Testament God of Love and Forgiveness - helped sculpt the Gnostic version of theology. They came up with a very logical construct: the God of the Old Testament that created the earth was not the Supreme Being at all, but a Demiurg, or lesser god, that was beneath the Supreme Being.
That solved a lot of issues, like God sending a Bear to slaughter children who made fun of some guy's baldness, or who helped the Israelites slaughter every man woman and child when they took over the land after escaping from Egypt. It also explains killing everyone on Earth but Noah in a flood, leaving mankind to be repopulated by incest.
That explanation was so compelling that it became very popular in the nascent Christian movement, see the Nag Hammadi discoveries. If you read the "Gospel of Thomas" and "Gospel of Mary" you will see the influence of Greek philosophy with early Christianity. I guess it is an open question whether some of it is from the now lost "Q" source or just made up stuff by radical sects/offshoots of Christianity. In any event, some of that thought made its way to Albania and Bulgaria, and even later in the Cathar movement in France in the 12th and 13th Centuries.
It (Cathar teachings about the lesser Old Testament God being evil ) was regarded as a serious threat to traditional Catholicism, and the Church put a stop to it with the sword. After many years of trying to peacefully persuade the Cathars to stop their theological nonsense, the Pope had had enough. ( Peacefully trying to convert the Cathars is what led to the formation of the Dominicans. It did not work.)
The Pope appointed a French Noble Simon de Montfort, who got serious about the problem. Mercenaries were hired to help end the Cathar heresy. Cathar towns were attacked. To convince the Cathars that they backed the wrong God, he had his men gouge out the eyes of 100 Cathar prisoners. He had their faces mutilated by cutting off lips and ears and noses, and then had them sent back to the besieged city, led by the one prisoner who had been allowed an eye left to find the way home.
Shockingly, the people of the town took that poorly, viewed it as non-Christian, and the resistance hardened.
In July of 1209 Montfort had the entire population of twenty thousand people in the besieged city of Beziers slaughtered - men, women and children - even though a great many of the townsfolk were not Cathars, but Catholics appalled at his tactics who were supporting their neighbors. When the frightened populace sought sanctuary in the main Cathedral of St Nazaire, he set it on fire. Those that fled were butchered.
So that you don't think that everyone back then was without a conscience, there were men in his army that questioned Montfort's actions, but he said "Tuez les tous, Dieu reconnaitra les siens" - or, "Kill them all, God will recognize his own!" The few who survived were used as target practice, tortured, blinded, etc. It took a few decades, but the Cathars were wiped out. To do so it needed the start up of a group called "The Spanish Inquisition" And we all know, Nothing stops the Spanish Inquisition!!
Actually, the were the same Dominicans who had found out that they could not win in a debate, but they could win by other tactics.
With that extra "Oomph" of the Inquisition, the theological excuse of reconciling the odd attributes of the Old Testament God to a chump lesser Deity was officially abolished.
The Cathars solution strikes me as much easier to reconcile than a God that sanctions the slaughter of innocents, but that is just me.
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