New (but ancient) Ideas about Gnosticism, the Goddess and our current situation in the world

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	• Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief John Lamb Lash Chelsea Green, 2006 - 464 pages average customer review:based on 14 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Superb!

Not In His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief, by John Lamb Lash, 2006

There comes a time when change needs to occur. Things need to evolve and grow; people need to learn, rather than to live in a perpetual state of morbid religious beliefs and ideas.

Part of that learning needs to come from history and from the facts of religion - and questioning indoctrinated religious beliefs. We need to investigate not just the bites of history and religion spoon fed to us by political and religious authorities, but from our own careful investigation into these matters.

The 4th century murder of Hypatia, one of the teachers at the great schools of Alexandria, marked the beginning of the dark age of Christianity, a dark age that continues to the present day, though most do not see or recognize this fact.

Jews and Christians murdering in the name of their god is a common theme in Judeo-Christianity's sordid past.

But what and who were they murdering? The so-called pagans and Gnostics were some of the most educated and advanced cultures/peoples on earth that were annihilated by these religious fanatics in the name of their god.

And what kind of psychotic god requires his people to kill his other creations in his name?

Most religious historians tell us that the Gnostic religion developed out of Christianity, not the other way around. But this actually requires us to believe that Christianity, unlike other religions, sprang suddenly from nowhere (as we're told to believe). That the event/advent of Jesus, God's so-called divine son, is what sparked the new, "true" religion. But is that really the truth?

The historical record outside the Bible certainly does not support what we're told to believe by the Church. If, instead, we look at Gnosticism as being far older than most believe, which many scholars have proposed, we suddenly gain a new and clear view of the origins of Christianity.

And what of the Dead Sea Scrolls? Is it true that they had an impact on the evolution of Christianity as John Marco Allegro suggested in The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth, and argued as one of the original DSS translators?

At the council of Nicaea Emperor Constantine pulled from these and many other religious doctrines to create the Universal creed, the Catholic Church, Christianity.

When we stop putting the cart before the horse, stop putting Christianity in the naïve realm of "sudden godly manifestation," and start realizing the themes and correlations between these ancient, suppressed texts and cultures, and the formation of Christianity, the picture becomes clear.

And it's not a pretty picture. What is revealed is a horrific history of Christians and Church fathers in a systematic effort to destroy all record of Gnosticism and the true facts regarding so-called "pagan" peoples surrounding the Mediterranean region for more than a thousand years. These mass genocides, as they should be called, wiped out untold ancient knowledge and cultures and hid these great truths. The library at Alexandria being only one of many that fanatic Christians destroyed, causing the loss of a thousand years of continued and recorded intellectual tradition in the development of science, religion and mankind, marking these acts as some of the greatest intellectual crimes in all history. The annihilation of the Celtics, Gnostics, and other "pagan" or village folk in the systematic wars of Rome, not to mention the Crusades and inquisitions, the witch hunts, and the sheer ferocity of the "kill them all and let god sort them out" mentality, destroyed the ancient history of these peoples and their records. But did it destroy it completely?

Fortunately the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi Library managed to escape the path of Judeo-Christian religious fervor, and we have on record much of what these people truly believed. And it wasn't in a jealous, patristic god as we're told; and the Gnostics and pagans weren't baby killers and eaters - as we now know that this was intentional disinformation spread by the Church to hide the history of their own pagan origins.

So what did these ancient people believe? They believed in a mother goddess, Sophia, and their ties to the Earth. They believed in the use of entheogens or psychedelic drugs, such as the shamans of today. They believed in Archons, an alien like creation that guides those who will be unquestioning and blind in their following of belief. They believed that the Judeo-Christian god, Yahweh, was in fact the angry, jealous god, an Archon, who fooled the masses into believing that he was the creator god, when he (or they), were more demon than God, more devil than Lord, a deception of historic proportions.

Does this sound like a development from Judeo-Christianity? With a careful reading of the ancient texts we find that in fact Christianity heavily plagiarized many of these ancient Gnostic and pagan texts into Christian canon, not the other way around. We know because when we understand all of these documents as a whole, that one is the original, and the other plagiarized. When you have a piece of manuscript from a missing book, it's quite easy to recognize where the passage fits once you find the rest of that book, and it is clear that the Bible came from that source, not the other way around.

Freeing the mind from 2000 years of global patristic, nihilistic, suicidal tendencies will require us as a species to come to terms with this fact, that the father god figure can never be truth, because he's always insecure, jealous, narcissistic, vein, angry and violent - schizophrenic. But there is another way -- the planet-friendly vision of Sophia, the wisdom goddess embodied in Gaia, the living earth.

This book is intellectual and deep. It is well written and well researched. I could go on all day quoting golden nuggets from its pages that Lash has pulled from the archives of history, but instead I'll suggest that you read the whole book.

Excellent! 5 stars.

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NOT IN HIS IMAGE

This was one of the best books I have read in a long time. John Lash is a treasure trove of information. He is an absolute expert in his field of religion, myth, and philosophy. After reading this book, I will never think of monotheistic religions as being benign and spiritual. This book is a real eye opener about life as it should be lived and how it once was before the good was wiped out of it by militant dogmatic beliefs. The concept of the Archons as an alien intrusion into our minds is also facinating. If true, it certainly explains how everything goes to extremes of evil before it is corrected. The missing link in warding off the Archons are the secret incantations that were lost because of the destructive behavior of the monontheists. I recommend this book to anyone interested in this subject.

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Lies exposed.

This book, along with all the research the author has done, I feel, proves what I have know for years- that the Abrahamic religions had many lies, falsehoods that became imposed on the societies of the world. The truth exposed here could turn the christian religion on its ear.
It's up to each one of us to deprogram the deeply ingrained programming imposed upon us by patriarchy. It's an inside individual job that has to happen in order to change "out there".
I highly recommend this book.
K.W.

New (but ancient) Ideas about Gnosticism, the Goddess and our current situation in the world

Lash opens up this ambitious & fascinating work with the story of Hypatia, or rather the murder of Hypatia by a crazed Christian mob in the early 5th century C.E. It is a shocking story and a powerful opening salvo in this all out attack on the Judeo Christian salvationist program. More than this, it makes a strong case that gnosticism, usually associated with early Christianity, is an ancient mystic and esoteric, Goddess based traditional worldview. The gnostic material is even referred to as "gospels" by Elaine Pagels, the best known writer on the gnostic writings linked to the discoveries of ancient texts near Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1947. Lash makes a case that the Nag Hammadi writings represent a mixed bag of narrative myths, poetry, philosophy and that they were hidden to protect them from marauding Christians. This is certainly a novel view of early Christians, persecuting the pagan mystery sites and the academic institutions that had grown up with them.

Lash essentially links the gnostic and Earth based religions to newer ideas about deep or sacred ecology. He sees a powerful link between these ancient, long hidden writings, and our current attempts to better understand our planet and its (her?) relationship to all life forms, including humans.

Lash also delves into the Dead Sea Scrolls, and links the Essene Community to Paul, Jesus, James and the early Christian community. This is a new and no doubt controversial portrayal of the Essene community, but it builds logically on the DSS. This is fascinating stuff, but difficult for a non expert to evaluate.

These are beautiful and powerful ideas, and Lash has written a book to provoke, inform and inspire.

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Not in His Image

All though more "wordy" than I thought necesary, I found this book execellent! There was more information than I'd expected and found that I became grateful to the author for writing it. I have and will continue to recommend it. Also, because of this book I have and will look into material that the author recommended.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3

Basing much of Not in His Image on the Nag Hammadi and other Gnostic writings, John Lamb Lash explains how a little-known messianic sect propelled itself into a dominant world power, systematically wiping out the great Gnostic spiritual teachers, the Druid priests, and the shamanistic healers of Europe and North Africa. They burned libraries and destroyed temples in an attempt to silence the ancient truth-tellers and keep their own secrets. But as Lash reveals, when the truth is the planet Earth it cannot be hidden or destroyed.

Not in His Image delves deeply into the shadows of ancient Gnostic writings to reconstruct the story early Christians tried to scrub from the pages of history, exploring the richness of the ancient European Pagan spirituality?the Pagan Mysteries, the Great Goddess, Gnosis, the myths of Sophia and Gaia?and chronicles the annihilation of this Pagan European culture at the hands of Christianity.

Long before the birth of Christianity, monotheism was an anomaly; Europe and the Near East flourished under the divine guidance of Sophia, the ancient goddess of wisdom. The Earth was the embodiment of Sophia and thus sacred to the people who sought fulfillment in her presence. This ancient philosophy was threatening to the emerging salvation-based creed of Christianity that was based on patriarchal dominion over the Earth and lauded personal suffering as a path to the afterlife. As Derrick Jensen points out in the afterword, in Lash?s hands Jesus Christ emerges as the agent provocateur of the ruling classes.

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