The Malevolent God

One can see how the Gnostics could come to eschew the God (Yahweh) of The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament.

That “God” or demiurge as the Gnostics had it was a vindictive, insane entity, far from divine and intrinsically hateful.

We’ve noted God’s personal wrath, exampled by Exodus 4:24 where Yahweh seeks to kill Moses, face-to-face.



Numbers 15:32 ff. also shows a God that is pathological: a man gathering sticks on the Sabbath is stoned to death by the Israelites at the direction of their God.

Verse 37, following, indicate an entity that is steeped in meaningless ritual; God’s directions indicate psychotic attention to nonsense.

Was Jesus the Son of this insane entity or was/is Jesus the Son of the ineffable God whom the Gnostics worshipped?



That is the important question, for persons of Faith.

We contend that the Hebraic God, Yahweh – a pseudonym surely, as the real name of God was unspoken and unmentionable as the Kabbalists note – is long dead, not metaphorically, as Nietzsche put it, but actually, in real physical terms.



And that this God could die is backed up by the Exodus account (above), which confirms God’s physical attributes; an eternal, infinite God? We think not.

The nature of the Hebrew God is footnoted in countless examples of insane behavior in The Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). A divine being might behave psychotically also, but we take the stance that the real God, God above god, is aloof, uncaring and removed from human existence unless provoked into attendance, as Melville intuits in his great unmasking of God: Moby Dick.



The now-dead God remains with us, in the form of the [Holy?] Spirit, so remnants of Evil persist, Satan or the Fourth Face of God, as Jung posited in his Quaternity thesis, still effective, but only as the “breath” of God, not as a physical presence.

For more on the demiurge, Yaldabaoth, see the Gnostic tract, On the Origin of the World [II, 5 and XIII, 2].

RR/JS

Yahweh the Phallic God vs The Unknowable God

Theologies, ancient and pre-modern, have provided views about God that posit how it is impossible to access the ultimate ineffability.

Theological thinking and common sense underscore the idea that God is so transcendent that no one can ever understand or see God face-to-face.

Although the Torah of the Hebrews, in its accounts of Moses having dialogue with God or “I am” indicates human contact with a perceptible being who professes to be God, the idea or reality is that Moses was gulled by what the Gnostics call the Demiurgos or The Demi-Urge, a being or thing that pretended to be God.

That God, Yahweh, was by, historical accounts, one of many pretenders to Divinity that haunted the Middle East, finally settling some kind of obtuse purposeful aim on the Hebrews.

One can equate Yahweh with the Phallic God of ancient mankind’s mythological reference.



The Hebrew Bible (and The Old Testament) offers several episodes of Yahweh’s obsession with the male sexual member, and the assumed obsession by Yahweh’s chosen few:

Genesis 17 The Covenant of circumcision

Genesis 47 Jacob asking Joseph to place his hand on his (Jacob’s) male member to show Joseph’s “love” for Jacob.

Deuteronomy 23 How men who have maltreated male members can’t be allowed into Jehovah’s congregation.

And Yahweh’s appearance, in the flesh, when he seeks Moses, to kill him, goes to the heart of the corporeality of Yahweh, something that the Gnostic God or the God referenced by Meister Eckhart as not intrinsic to the Supreme Being.

See Exodus 24: The Lord came upon Moses and would have killed him….

See The Apocryphon of John II, 1-32 He is the invisible spirit….not corporeal nor incorporeal.

See Meister Eckhart Sermon XV God is something which is in no sense to be reached or grasped….

The view(s) of the Gnostics and transcendentalist philosophers, about God corresponds to heretical views as ingrained religions have it.

Religion(s) hold to the view(s) of God promulgated by the Hebrew texts, generally, and, thus, are constrained by the sham that Yahweh instigated on the Jews and those who adopted the Hebrew practices as part of their religious observances and theologies.



However, some of the Gnostic practices and admonitions are skewed also, but not in substantive ways.

Yet, caveats prevail there too.

And we’ll be addressing those upcoming….

RR/JS