Showing posts sorted by date for query GNOSTIC JESUS. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by date for query GNOSTIC JESUS. Sort by relevance Show all posts

Sunday, August 16, 2026

A Transgender Gospel Against Western Civilization


 August 14, 2026

They say that the arch of history bends towards progress but as a trans person in the midst of the second decade of the twenty-first century, I find myself torn at the crossroads of an increasingly bewildering age. On the one hand, transgender and gender diverse people in the West have never experienced a greater level of exposure and popular acceptance. On the other hand, these same trans people, my people, have also never faced a greater threat of state-sanctioned violence and outright erasure.

The Human Rights Campaign has found in recent polls that 41% of American adults report to personally know at least one person who openly identifies as transgender and another 85% of Americans claim that they accept that trans people should be afforded the same rights and protections as anyone else. This includes a full 76% of Republicans and the pop-cultural zeitgeist seems to concur.

Flipping through any random barrage of TV channels and/or streaming services, you will certainly find more than your fair share of programming presenting transgender people in a positive if exceedingly narrow light.

With all that being said, it can be a little hard to feel the love of statistical bromides and cultural tokenism beneath the flame of a state-fueled blowtorch.

The Republican Party has been on the warpath for some time now, openly seeking to annihilate all things trans for at least a decade, and the Trump Administration seems to represent the zenith of this campaign. A litany of executive orders signed by Trump since 2025 have directed the Federal Government to define gender as an immutable binary determined exclusively by a single document inked at birth while also commanding the most powerful government on earth to use every piece of regulatory and penal machinery at its disposal to erase anything and anyone who defies this edict.

Compulsory schools have been ordered to deprive trans children of even the most basic human dignity. Prisons and juvenile detention centers have been ordered to forcibly detransition inmates in what can only be legally described as medical experimentation. And foster homes and other related youth services have been given the green light to use all manner of religious quackery to torment the trans youth grossly overrepresented under their so-called care.

It shouldn’t take a goddamn human rights organization to tell you that this concerted campaign of forced erasure from public life qualifies as nothing less than genocide, but the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention has done just that, warning that such policies and rhetoric as mentioned above match the early stages of a genocidal process based on what has been historically documented across the globe over the last century.

How in the hell is this kind of disconnect between governance and popular sentiment even possible and how did we get to such an absurdly dichotomous place as a nation, actively seeking to eradicate a people the majority of the country shows very little outward animosity towards?

The reason for the violence is fairly simple, at least to any committed student of historical collapse. The American Empire is in the early stages of the kind of long, slow disintegration that ultimately befalls all imperial hegemons. Our nation is not only rapidly losing the faith of its own citizenry, it is losing the faith of many of its own proxies who are showing increasingly bold signs of going rogue with the barbarians at the gates.

Traditionally, under such dyer circumstance, collapsing empires frequently appeal to small but fanatical death cults within the upper echelons of their polluted societies. For Pax-Americana under the reign of Imperator Trump this means riling up the Christo-Zionist Millenarians of the Evangelical Movement.

In order to keep this powerful minority engaged and committed to a series of increasingly pointless and unwinnable wars, the Empire needs to feed them a juicy scapegoat now and then and thus they rally the doom seekers around the spook of the evil, mincing, transgender groomer lurking in a women’s room near you.

On multiple occasions, I have seen Donald Trump cornered in the Oval Office with offensively polite questions about his abject failure to reign in a thrice decapitated third world nation in the Persian Gulf only to witness that soiled Ceasar bark incoherently about ‘men in women’s sports’ and some conspiracy to ‘trans all the children.’ This rhetoric isn’t for the general public; it’s for a very specific moneyed faithful amongst the petite bourgeoisie. The kind of people willing to drop nukes on Gaza just to see Jesus ride back to earth on a dinosaur.

But what of the silent tolerant majority? What happened to all that glorious acceptance we soaked up under Imperator Biden?

Sadly, regardless of popular sentiment, it was all little more than worthless rhetorical platitudes; the desperate byproduct of a rival attempt to save the bad name of the same empire now busy erasing us.

Every empire consists of a constant contest between competing elites. These elites tend to share virtually identical goals. They tend to struggle to protect the same institutions that empower all of them. They just don’t always agree on the best strategy to do this. Some of them will even go so far as to vigorously compete for the highest position on their mountain of skulls and that is what we are witnessing here with this facetious war over trans rights.

In spite of their hollow rhetoric, the Democrats do not support Queer people. They fund the exact same prisons and compulsory school system that serve to enslave and marginalize us as their Republican rivals do. The Democrats simply seek to use the spook of ‘LGBTQ tolerance’ to prove that the Empire which thrashes us is capable of humanitarian inclusion. After all, how can the Devil be a monster while he’s petting a kitten?

This kind of imperial inclusion has done nothing to serve my people. Quite the contrary, it has only made us appear complicit in the corruption of our tormentors. Transgender people have become associated with a morally bankrupt society by conservatives in the same fashion that many Christians have by those on the left.

We have all become human shields in a culture war between different factions of elite imperial casualties and that is a revolting shame. Your average redneck Jesus freak cares far more about Palestine, Ohio than Jerusalem and your average tranny lunatic cares far more about the gulags of their own local wing of the Prison Industrial Complex than Putin’s Russia. But we are all compelled to warfare, both with each other and the world, in the name of strikingly similar concepts of Western cultural universalism.

I myself inhabit a decidedly vexing space in this manufactured cataclysm as I happen to be something of a Christian as well as something of a transwoman. In fact, both of these disciplines are inspired by the same commitment I owe to Gnostic Sophiology and both of those seemingly divergent phenomena predate what we now know as Western Civilization.

Christianity was just one of many schools of ancient Gnostic mysticism to spring from the battlefields of the Levant onto the streets of Rome before that Empire, the very same empire that crucified Christianity’s namesake, decided to use that particular school popular among the urban Roman working class to justify their struggling empire’s continued existence and endless expansion.

In the process of assimilation, entire Gospels were purged from the Bible while others were censored and manipulated beyond recognition and from this manipulation modern Western Civilization was born.

In spite of the fact that Christ made zero reference to the third genders which existed both in Europe and the Levant during his lifetime, the newly Roman Catholic Church and its colonial Protestant progeny in England blasphemously used the name of Christ to erase all trace of any form of gender expression that existed outside the binary.

As Christian law gelled into a single dictum across Medieval Europe, rigid gender norms were enforced that essentially rendered women into breeding stock and viewed all forms of fluidity between male and female as a threat to an order designed to reduce the womb into a glorified soldier factory to populate the battlefields of an endless crusade for more church property.

The Enlightenment only served to reinforce this rigid gender binary by declaring that construct be a science and rendering it to a distinction that could only be determined by the state. Thus, the tyranny of the birth certificate became sanctified by liberal secularism.

The Enlightenment also fostered the rise of chattel slavery and indigenous genocide with its similar breakthroughs in scientific racism, opening the door for missionaries to erase even more ancient third genders from the face of multiple continents. Be they two spirit or hijra, they were all sentenced to the same fate as the so-called eunuchs of the Gospels; marginalization to the point of erasure.

But both wings of the West failed and we are still here, fighting yet another wave of imperial subjugation on our own, while the elites compete over their kingdom of skulls in another pointless midterm election circus.

And here I stand with you today, during what has been declared Transgender History Month by some corporate monolith or another, as a devout Marian witch, a post-civ genderqueer anarchist, and perhaps above all else, living, spitting, hissing proof of the failures of Western Civilization in all its secular cabals and devout renditions.

They all failed. They failed to contain the Holy Spirit beneath the jar of a single tyrannical church, and they failed to contain the human spirit beneath the jar of a manufactured gender binary, just as they have failed to contain the Axis of Resistance beneath their bombs.

My message to you, my dearest motherfuckers, and to any agent of imperial bureaucracy surveilling this screed, is that the Christo-Zionist horde is right about one thing and that is that gender outlaws like me are the bane of Western Civilization.

To this slur I proudly shout, ‘your goddamn right we are and we’re here to finish the job that the third world started!’ You can pass all the laws and royal edicts you want. The writing is already scrawled in Venus Extravaganza’s blood all over the temple walls; your stadium church is a massive tomb of material emptiness and your empire’s days of rape and honey are numbered.

Death to the old gods! Long live the ancient gods! And long live those of us compelled to transgress in their honor, for we shall inherit the ruins of a blasphemous era and bring forth a new age of tribal diversity in stiletto heels and smeared lipstick.

Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.



Saturday, May 10, 2025

A GNOSTIC BIBLE

Feminine Translation Bible receives award from Religion Communicators Council

Mark 7 Publishing


RNS Press Release Distribution Service
May 8, 2025

The Holy Bible Feminine Translation, the only word-for-word translation that translates the Holy Spirit to the feminine gender, received the Award of Merit from the Religion Communicators Council.

The Holy Bible Feminine Translation Expanded Edition 2 was published July 2024 in paperback and digital pdf by Mark 7 Publishing.

The Holy Bible Feminine Translation Version (FTV-Bible) is a word-for-word translation containing bias free Scriptures that uses the American Standard Version of 1901 (ASV) for its starting textual base. The ASV is the product of the work of over 50 Evangelical Christian scholars that has been called “The Rock of Biblical Honesty.”  The goal of this Bible is to carry forward this legacy of biblical Honesty with recognition of the dual feminine attributes of God as well as His dual masculine attributes.

The FTV-Bible is a result of interpreting and translating the Bible through the Discipline of the Cross of YHWH, written 6,876 times, pronounced Yahweh. The Study section shows the cross is a consistent destination of seven Sprits of God that deciphers Bible text called Jesus’ Witness Cipher.

Bridging Beliefs in the HOLY BIBLE Feminine Translation Version

A Bridge to Gender Balance
The Divine Feminine is a spiritual and philosophical concept representing the feminine counterpart to traditionally patriarchal and masculine frameworks in religion, culture, and energy systems. The Divine Feminine in this Feminine Translation Bible can be seen as the dual feminine attributes of God. The Most-High Holy Spirit of Light, heavenly Mother of the Son of God, and Sons of Light, plus the earthly mother of all living humans, serve as a bridge to counterbalance gender in this Bible.

An Earth to Heaven Bridge
This Bible was translated through the Discipline of the Cross, where on the foot it is written: BeholdI am YHWH —the God of all flesh(Jer 32:27)   All living humans are translated to be children of our Father God through His divine feminine daughter Eve, the mother of all living humans (Gen 3:20)   whom we are all natural descendants on the foot of an Earth to Heaven Bridge— the Tree of Life Cross.(Cipher 3)  She bruised the head of the serpent when she birthed her God appointed seed, Seth, who began the righteous line of all the “elect” Patriarchs in Luke’s ascending genealogy of Jesus Christ.(Cipher 31) The Elect are those predestined to be saved. (Cipher 36)

Numbered Bridges (Study section)
There are 15 crosses numbered 77 77 77 77 in the Old Testament, that together is a bridge of understanding for Israel to the 77 77 77 77 Genealogy Cross of their Messiah, who begins the New Testament. These bridges are previously hidden signs that the Jews demanded, while the Greeks looked for wisdom (1Cor 1:22) The number 77 is the signature number of Jesus Christ. (Cipher 48)

A 6,000 Year Bridge (Study section)
Jesus Witness Cipher is a timeless phenomenon for deciphering Bible text that teaches one how to SEE and visually perceive Scripture through the Cross. This previously hidden, recurring, phenomenon is timeless, because it has consistently structured Scripture that bridges a period of 6,000 years using 40 different human authors.  Validated with the Discipline of Biblical Numbers, this timeless Cipher bears witness of a single divine author of the Bible 77 times. It illustrates how the Cross is the consistent destination of Seven Spirits of God, that answer seven questions in divine order, that seamlessly bridges the Old Testament to the New Testament.


Since 1949, the Wilbur Awards have been presented annually to recognize excellence in the communication of religious issues, values, and themes in public secular media.Through the awards, the Religion Communicators Council (RCC) recognizes the work of individuals, production companies and agencies as they communicate about religious issues, values and themes with professionalism, fairness, respect and honesty.

Past winners include Morgan Freeman, Oprah Winfrey, Jane Pauley, Mister Rogers, CBS Sunday Morning, ABC’s 20/20, Meet the Press, Vanity Fair, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and the New York Times.

The Award of Merit is the level of recognition provided by the Religion Communicators Council, for work deemed meritorious and worthy of acknowledgment

###

Contact:
JW Farquhar
Mark 7 Publishing
8035170451
farquhar.jw@gmail.com

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of RNS or Religion News Foundation.

Saturday, March 08, 2025

POSTMODERN GNOSTICISM

Harvard scientist Michael Ferguson and the Neurospirituality Lab launch Lenten Project on The Jesus Prayer

Prayer Science


Groundbreaking project explores the psychological, behavioral, and spiritual effects of The Jesus Prayer

Harvard Scientist Michael Ferguson and the Neurospirituality Lab Launch Project on The Jesus Prayer and Its Psychological and Spiritual Impacts

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — This Lenten season, Harvard scientist Michael Ferguson (PhD) and the Neurospirituality Lab are launching a groundbreaking project exploring the psychological, behavioral, and spiritual effects of The Jesus Prayer, an ancient contemplative practice with roots in early Christianity.

Sponsored by the Templeton World Charity Foundation, this six-part project invites participants to engage in guided instruction on The Jesus Prayer, a meditative prayer tradition developed by the Desert Mothers and Fathers of ancient Christianity. Through this immersive experience, participants will complete scientifically designed questionnaires to assess how this practice influences well-being, cognition, and spiritual experience.

“This is an exciting opportunity to bring rigorous scientific inquiry to a sacred practice that has shaped Christian spirituality for centuries,” said Dr. Michael Ferguson, the lead scientist of the project. “We hope to uncover meaningful insights into how contemplative prayer influences psychological and behavioral health, as well as spiritual experience.”

The project involves a short online course that includes:
•    A historical and theological introduction to The Jesus Prayer
•    Practical techniques for incorporating the prayer into daily life
•    Scientific assessments to examine the effects of the practice over time

Congregations or other faith communities interested in engaging with the project as a group may be eligible for private meetings with Dr. Ferguson to discuss the results and their broader implications for spiritual life.

This research builds upon ongoing investigations into the neuroscience of prayer, meditation, and spirituality. By combining ancient wisdom with modern scientific methods, the project aims to provide new insights into the role of contemplative practices in human flourishing.

Participation and Contact Information
Individuals and groups interested in participating can find more information by visiting:
https://prayerscience.org/the-jesus-prayer

###

Contact:
Morgan Healey
Prayer Science
8014523674
morgan@neurospirituality.io

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of RNS or Religion News Foundation.


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Wednesday, December 25, 2024

BAH, HUMBUG

Findings cast doubt on the existence of Jesus Christ


Yes, there is a war between science and religion

Valerie Tarico
December 24, 2024
ALTERNET

Most antiquities scholars think that the New Testament gospels are "mythologized history." In other words, based on the evidence available they think that around the start of the first century a controversial Jewish rabbi named Yeshua ben Yosef gathered a following and his life and teachings provided the seed that grew into Christianity. At the same time, these scholars acknowledge that many Bible stories like the virgin birth, miracles, resurrection, and women at the tomb borrow and rework mythic themes that were common in the Ancient Near East, much the way that screenwriters base new movies on old familiar tropes or plot elements. In this view, a "historical Jesus" became mythologized.



For over 200 years, a wide ranging array of theologians and historians grounded in this perspective have analyzed ancient texts, both those that made it into the Bible and those that didn't, in attempts to excavate the man behind the myth. Several current or recent bestsellers take this approach, distilling the scholarship for a popular audience. Familiar titles include Zealot by Reza Aslan and How Jesus Became God by Bart Ehrman.

By contrast, other scholars believe that the gospel stories are actually "historicized mythology." In this view, those ancient mythic templates are themselves the kernel. They got filled in with names, places and other real world details as early sects of Jesus worship attempted to understand and defend the devotional traditions they had received.

The notion that Jesus never existed is a minority position. Of course it is! says David Fitzgerald, the author of Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All. Fitzgerald points out that for centuries all serious scholars of Christianity were Christians themselves, and modern secular scholars lean heavily on the groundwork that they laid in collecting, preserving, and analyzing ancient texts. Even today most secular scholars come out of a religious background, and many operate by default under historical presumptions of their former faith.

Fitzgerald–who, as his book title indicates, takes the "mythical Jesus" position–is an atheist speaker and writer, popular with secular students and community groups. The internet phenom, Zeitgeist the Movie introduced millions to some of the mythic roots of Christianity. But Zeitgeist and similar works contain known errors and oversimplifications that undermine their credibility. Fitzgerald seeks to correct that by giving young people accessible information that is grounded in accountable scholarship.

More academic arguments in support of the Jesus Myth theory can be found in the writings of Richard Carrier and Robert Price. Carrier, who has a Ph.D. in ancient history uses the tools of his trade to show, among other things, how Christianity might have gotten off the ground without a miracle. Price, by contrast, writes from the perspective of a theologian whose biblical scholarship ultimately formed the basis for his skepticism. It is interesting to note that some of the harshest critics of popular Jesus myth theories like those from Zeitgeist or Joseph Atwill (who argued that the Romans invented Jesus) are academic Mythicists like these.

The arguments on both sides of this question—mythologized history or historicized mythology—fill volumes, and if anything the debate seems to be heating up rather than resolving. Since many people, both Christian and not, find it surprising that this debate even exists—that serious scholars might think Jesus never existed—here are some of the key points that keep the doubts alive:

1. No first century secular evidence whatsoever exists to support the actuality of Yeshua ben Yosef.

In the words of Bart Ehrman (who himself believes the stories were built on a historical kernel):
"What sorts of things do pagan authors from the time of Jesus have to say about him? Nothing. As odd as it may seem, there is no mention of Jesus at all by any of his pagan contemporaries. There are no birth records, no trial transcripts, no death certificates; there are no expressions of interest, no heated slanders, no passing references – nothing. In fact, if we broaden our field of concern to the years after his death – even if we include the entire first century of the Common Era – there is not so much as a solitary reference to Jesus in any non-Christian, non-Jewish source of any kind. I should stress that we do have a large number of documents from the time – the writings of poets, philosophers, historians, scientists, and government officials, for example, not to mention the large collection of surviving inscriptions on stone and private letters and legal documents on papyrus. In none of this vast array of surviving writings is Jesus' name ever so much as mentioned." (pp. 56-57)

2. The earliest New Testament writers seem ignorant of the details of Jesus' life, which become more crystalized in later texts.

Paul seems unaware of any virgin birth, for example. No wise men, no star in the east, no miracles. Historians have long puzzled over the "Silence of Paul" on the most basic biographical facts and teachings of Jesus. Paul fails to cite Jesus' authority precisely when it would make his case. What's more, he never calls the twelve apostles Jesus' disciples; in fact, he never says Jesus HAD disciples –or a ministry, or did miracles, or gave teachings. He virtually refuses to disclose any other biographical detail, and the few cryptic hints he offers aren't just vague, but contradict the gospels. The leaders of the early Christian movement in Jerusalem like Peter and James are supposedly Jesus' own followers and family; but Paul dismisses them as nobodies and repeatedly opposes them for not being true Christians!

Liberal theologian Marcus Borg suggests that people read the books of the New Testament in chronological order to see how early Christianity unfolded.
Placing the Gospels after Paul makes it clear that as written documents they are not the source of early Christianity but its product. The Gospel — the good news — of and about Jesus existed before the Gospels. They are the products of early Christian communities several decades after Jesus' historical life and tell us how those communities saw his significance in their historical context.


3. Even the New Testament stories don't claim to be first-hand accounts.

We now know that the four gospels were assigned the names of the apostles Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, not written by them. To make matter sketchier, the name designations happened sometime in second century, around 100 years or more after Christianity supposedly began.

For a variety of reasons, the practice of pseudonymous writing was common at the time and many contemporary documents are "signed" by famous figures. The same is true of the New Testament epistles except for a handful of letters from Paul (6 out of 13) which are broadly thought to be genuine. But even the gospel stories don't actually say, "I was there." Rather, they claim the existence of other witnesses, a phenomenon familiar to anyone who has heard the phrase, my aunt knew someone who . . . .

4. The gospels, our only accounts of a historical Jesus, contradict each other.


If you think you know the Jesus story pretty well, I suggest that you pause at this point to test yourself with the 20 question quiz at ExChristian.net.

The gospel of Mark is thought to be the earliest existing "life of Jesus," and linguistic analysis suggests that Luke and Matthew both simply reworked Mark and added their own corrections and new material. But they contradict each other and, to an even greater degree contradict the much later gospel of John, because they were written with different objectives for different audiences. The incompatible Easter stories offer one example of how much the stories disagree.

5. Modern scholars who claim to have uncovered the real historical Jesus depict wildly different persons.

They include a cynic philosopher, charismatic Hasid, liberal Pharisee, conservative rabbi, Zealot revolutionary, and nonviolent pacifist to borrow from a much longer list assembled by Price. In his words (pp. 15-16), "The historical Jesus (if there was one) might well have been a messianic king, or a progressive Pharisee, or a Galilean shaman, or a magus, or a Hellenistic sage. But he cannot very well have been all of them at the same time." John Dominic Crossan of the Jesus Seminar grumbles that "the stunning diversity is an academic embarrassment."


For David Fitzgerald, these issues and more lead to a conclusion that he finds inescapable:
Jesus appears to be an effect, not a cause, of Christianity. Paul and the rest of the first generation of Christians searched the Septuagint translation of Hebrew scriptures to create a Mystery Faith for the Jews, complete with pagan rituals like a Lord's Supper, Gnostic terms in his letters, and a personal savior god to rival those in their neighbors' longstanding Egyptian, Persian, Hellenistic and Roman traditions.

In a soon-to-be-released follow up to Nailed, entitled Jesus: Mything in Action, Fitzgerald argues that the many competing versions proposed by secular scholars are just as problematic as any "Jesus of Faith:"

Even if one accepts that there was a real Jesus of Nazareth, the question has little practical meaning: Regardless of whether or not a first century rabbi called Yeshua ben Yosef lived, the "historical Jesus" figures so patiently excavated and re-assembled by secular scholars are themselves fictions.

We may never know for certain what put Christian history in motion. Only time (or perhaps time travel) will tell.

____________________________

Author's note: Not being an insider to this debate, my own inclination is to defer to the preponderance of relevant experts while keeping in mind that paradigm shifts do occur. This means that until either the paradigm shift happens or I become a relevant expert myself, I shall assume that the Jesus stories probably had some historical kernel. That said, I find the debate fascinating for several reasons: For one, it offers a glimpse of the methods scholars use to analyze ancient texts. Also, despite the heated back and forth between mythicists and historicists, their points of agreement may be more significant than the difference between historicized mythology and mythologized history. The presence of mythic tropes or legendary elements in the gospel stories has been broadly accepted and documented, while the imprint of any actual man who may have provided a historical kernel–how he may have lived, what he may have said, and how he died–is more hazy than most people dream.

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington. She is the author of Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light and Deas and Other Imaginings, and the founder of www.WisdomCommons.org. Subscribe to her articles at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com.