For the month of July, I will be debating from the position of Gnosticism. This is not a position I personally hold - I'm an atheist - but it is a position rarely seen on r/DebateReligion, and will hopefully provide some variety.

Here is a brief explanation of Gnosticism.

Human existence is unavoidably characterized by suffering. This suffering exists because we live in a flawed world. Animals must eat each other to survive; human hopes and dreams can be silently and pointlessy extinguished by fire, flood, disease, famine, etc.; we must operate with imperfect knowledge, and thus cannot avoid most of our actions being erroneous in one way or another; and so forth. These features show that the world in general, and humans in particular, were created badly. We could have been made better than this, but we just weren't.

None of this is our fault. The blame rests entirely with the Creator, who did this to us. Either the Creator was deluded about the long-term consequences of the creation, or the Creator just didn't care about our suffering. Worship of the Creator is therefore, at best, severely misguided.

None of this disproves the Scholastic arguments, of course. It's just that they made the incorrect assumption that the First Cause was the Creator. It's more complex than that. The genuine First Cause - the True God - did not create our flawed material existence. Instead, the True God gave rise to other entities. Gnostics refer to these as Aeons. One such Aeon, who we call Sophia, gave rise to a supernatural being, called the Demiurge, which was unaware of its origins. The Demiurge shaped the material world, honestly but incorrectly believing it to be the Demiurge's own creation ex nihilo. In reality, like everything else, it was formed from the essence of the True God.

So human beings are made of a dual essence: We are made of the matter and energy of the Demiurge, but also imbued with the divine spark of the True God. Without that spark, we would not walk and talk and think. We are generally ignorant of the divine spark. In fact the Demiurge has created many religions with the express purpose of obfuscating the truth and making it hard for us to come to know the True God. We should harbor a deep suspicion of religious authority figures, because nearly all of them are puppets of the Demiurge. The only true path to knowledge is Gnosis, the introspective and individual search for truth.

However, Gnosis is not something you can just do on your own, because it is subtle and complex. Teachers, referred to by Gnostics as the Messengers of Light, can show us the way. It is important to distinguish between teachers and leaders. True Messengers of Light are strictly teachers. They do not demand obedience or obseiance. They give knowledge to those who wish to hear. Leaders are the opposite: They withhold knowledge and demand ignorant servitude. Leaders are from the Demiurge; Messengers are from the True God, or the better Aeons.

The Bible is interesting to Gnosticism, but it is interpreted with a view to distinguishing the true Messengers from the servants of the Demiurge. For example, the Demiurge appears in person in the Genesis story of the Garden of Eden. The Messenger in that story is the serpent, who gives knowledge of good and evil to Adam and Eve. This infuriates the Demiurge, because it frustrates his plan to maintain Adam and Eve in a state of ignorance. The so-called "Curse of God" is just more evidence that the God of the Book of Genesis is not the True God.

Most Gnostics believe, and I will be taking the position, that Jesus was a Messenger of Light. This is, of course, heretical to Nicene or Trinitarian Christianity. Even so, Gnosticism can still be thought of as monotheist, because the True God is the only God; other beings, supernatural or natural, are not God. Gnostic Jesus was not in any sense the Son of God: His status was entirely human - which is to say he was a wretched creature, able to transcend his flawed nature only through Gnosis. The difference is that Jesus was the most successful, and had learned so much of the truth of the True God that he became the greatest teacher (Messenger) in our history.

Not necessarily looking for any debate here - I'm just posting this in the hope that people might know what I'm talking about on other threads. However, I will do my best to answer questions or objections on this thread.