#TIL about Marcion, a Christian thinker circa 140 AD, who had a deliciously Terry Pratchett/Neil Gaiman worldview: Wikipedia will suffice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcionism#Teachings
"Marcionites held that the God of the Hebrew Bible [who created the world] was inconsistent, jealous, wrathful and genocidal, and that the material world he created was defective, a place of suffering; the God who made such a world is a bungling or malicious demiurge."
In contrast…
1/2
2/2
"In Marcionite belief, Christ was not a Jewish Messiah, but a spiritual entity that was sent by [the True Christian God] to reveal the truth about existence, thus allowing humanity to escape the earthly trap of [the terrible Jewish creator God]. Marcion called [the True] God, the Stranger God, or the Alien God, in some translations, as this deity had not had any previous interactions with the world, and was wholly unknown." —https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcionism#Teachings
What a delightful, well-wrought idea!
@22 I always liked this about gnosticism. I guess that's why I like pleroma :)
@wim_v12e Thanks for mentioning that! I read about all this in a book by Bart Ehrman, who didn't mention the gnosticism connection at all: I learned about that only in Wikipedia. But, after only thinking about it for only a few minutes, the connection seems anachronistic—Marcion seems to have simply taken Paul's ideas about Law vs Gospel to the natural logical conclusion. I wouldn't invoke anything mystical or secret about Marcion's views, just, a wackiness, and mayyybe political naivete :)
