re re: America's gnostic religion

[Ghetta Life]

Small "g" gnosticism means very little in the specific beyond a general "the 
world is an evil place" attitude.  And calling this attitude gnosticism 
gives Gnosticism the premier spot holder of this attitude.  Martin Luther 
must be credited with the Protestant version of this attitude which survives 
now in Evangelism, and he surely didn't get it from Gnosticism (supposedly 
he got his revelation while sitting at the "privvy,"  but here is ample 
source for it in the New Testament).  Blooms book may be very good, but if 
it starts by glossing over these facts I have serious doubts about it.

<<2Cr 4:4   "In whom the ***god of this world*** [The Devil} hath blinded 
the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel 
of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.">>

Ghetta

>"Our authentic Gnosticisms are scattered wherever our
>new southern and western Republican overlords worship:
>  in Salt Lake City and Dallas and wherever else Mormon
>temples and Southern Baptist First Churches pierce the
>heavens. Our American Religion, whether homegrown or
>ostensibly Roman Catholic and mainline Protestant, is
>more of a Gnostic amalgam than a European kind of
>historical and doctrinal Christianity, though very few
>are able to see this, or perhaps don't wish to see it.
>[...] there are a handful or so of mainline Protestant
>ministers who now understand that their neo-orthodoxy
>is yielding to a populist neo-Gnosticism. [...] I
>sometimes allow myself the fantasy of Saint Paul
>redescending upon a contemporary America where he
>still commands extraordinary honor, among religions as
>diverse as Roman Catholicism and Southern Baptism. He
>would be bewildered, not by change, but by sameness,
>and would believe he was back at Corinth and Colossae,
>confronted again by Gnostic myths of the angels who
>made this world. [...]
>-Harold Bloom, _Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of
>Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection_

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