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Seems kind of offtopic, but that's a quote from the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, considered apocryphal by most Christian sects.

The gentleman who wrote this article complains, "why has it taken nearly 50 years for the contents of this material to be made fully public?" He fails to understand the simplest reason: the public doesn't really care enough. That is to say, some members of the public might care enough to read parts of a translation.

IMO, it's taken as long as it has because the scrolls were anciently written on papyrus or some other cloth or paper and stuffed together for storage. Some were preserved better than others, but still, IIRC, these papyrus and/or whatever-substance fragments can be very difficult to separate ("unroll") and in some cases have been reassembled manually. I am NOT an expert on the DSS. Another factor, of course, is the frequent political turmoil in the Middle East.

Also, as technology to analyze ancient stuck-together papyri has improved, reanalysis would seem to be required for much of the analyzed portions for the analyses to be scientifically valid. FWIW. Also. And. Too. For Chemists and ACS Admirers. For gnostics.

I'm sure you can find many other points of view.

> It's known, for instance, that the Church suppressed the Gospel of Thomas. The only remaining full copy that we know of was found at Nag Hammadi in the 20th century. It escaped the purge by virtue of being hidden for 1800 years or so.

The church suppressed the Gospel of Thomas because it is freakin' stupid. Go Read it. http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/gosthom.html It's about as incoherent and bizarre as the teachings of Scientology.

Here's some choice readings:

114. Simon Peter said to them, "Make Mary leave us, for females don't deserve life." Jesus said, "Look, I will guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of Heaven."

My Comment: So much for the 'sacred feminine' of the DaVinci Code

4. Jesus said, "The person old in days won't hesitate to ask a little child seven days old about the place of life, and that person will live. For many of the first will be last, and will become a single one."

13. ...When Thomas came back to his friends they asked him, "What did Jesus say to you?" Thomas said to them, "If I tell you one of the sayings he spoke to me, you will pick up rocks and stone me, and fire will come from the rocks and devour you."

22. ...Jesus said to them, "When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter [the kingdom]."

WTF?

Unfortunately, quoting the rules can get you ejected from the game. Let me instead recommend some good books.

"To kill a religion, you'd either have to kill every single person whose faith is in this religion, or you have to convince everyone who believes that his religion is wrong. Now, the former is by its very definition impossible. Ya know, there was a nation about 60 years ago whose plan was exactly that. It costed millions of lives, but it did certainly not destroy the religion."

It depends. Ever heard of the Nag Hammadi Library?
http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/nhl.html

The Catholic church at the height of its powers (3rd-4th century) did a pretty good of destroying all the followers of competing sects or "convincing" them that they were wrong. But they were just Christians.

Jews? No way. Guaranteed the ethno-religion of 54% of the world's chess champions since 1886 is smart enough to have a contingency plan for everything including mass nuclear warfare. It would literally take an act of god to wipe them out. (e.g. Moon sized asteroid hitting the earth, sun going supernova, God accidentally hitting the Red Button). And if they had any forewarning at all, their efforts in conquering space would make the Manhattan project look like a science fair project.

A lot of what went on in early christianity was effectively done by the roman state in order to try to keep the unruly christians in line. One interesting thing about the christian church is that originally the churches were households and in rome most households were run by women though supposedly under the will of the man. Anyway the head of the household also functioned as the head of the church in question, so many women were priests in the early days of christianity. However, you simply can't have women in charge of things, so when the movement began to gain political currency they kicked them all out of their positions of power. And, in particular, the Gospel of Mary which exalts Mary Magdalene over Jesus' male disciples, and The Gospel of Mary Magdalene are both left out of the bible as if they were unimportant.

And if original texts do turn up at a later date, translations are often not corrected out of fear of shocking the readership with a more accurate (but unexpected) rendering. And that's even without counting deliberate forgeries.

Ah but even if "original texts" are found the church can turn around and call them blasphemous as the Vatican did with the Nag Hammadi texts. If anything threatens their grasp they will call it blasphemous.

These objects are more permanent then an electronic copy. If a powerful group wanted to 'rewrite history', they could never destroy all of the old copies of these text. There are hundreds or thousands of copies of these same texts laying around in attics, closets and museums throughout the the US and Europe.

Tell that to the early Christian church. Sure it may be possible to find old books but then the authorities can do what the Vatican did when some old books of the early church were found at Nag Hammadi in the 1940s, they called them blasphemous.

Books are far less fragile than any of this digital crap.

Digitizing does not usually capture all of the useful information about the book, either. What was the paper made of? How was it bound? What type of ink was used? This type of info can be critically important for resolving controversies about the authenticity of certain old manuscripts (think The Gospel According to Mary Magdalene or The Vinland Map).

Another problem is that the software needed to interpret the 0s and 1s needs to be kept with the digitized copy. If the data are stored as, say, tiff images, then you'd better make sure that there is software to display tiff imgages around as long as the original data stream is kept.

Bottom line is that digital archiving solves some problems but not all and creates whole new headaches as well.

Beautiful!

I don't know why the light should illumine the wall. It is enough to be with what is for me. The light is just a bonus because I have a choice :-)

From the Gospel of Thomas:

77. Jesus said, "I am the light that is over all things. I am all: from me all came forth, and to me all attained.

Split a piece of wood; I am there.

Lift up the stone, and you will find me there."

So basically, there's no difference between God, us and the rest of the world. If it looks like that, it's just our shadow.

I think realizing that is our highest attainment, but you don't just realize it with your brain but as a direct experience - what is called Enlightenment.

No, I'm not a big fan of ID or Creationism either, but I believe consciousness and spirit is over matter: We are not humans having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings have a human experience.

So for me it is a Big Mind.. A Very mysterious one.

Please, please, won't the aliens take me home?!?

There happens to be a religion which teaches general distrust for governments, the development of an individual moral code, and a final escape into a world that actually makes sense.

These beliefs were all part of one of the earliest flavors of Christianity, which happened to be one of the very first to be declared heretical by the government-backed version of the church.

bored? why not check it out?

What is this...object oriented movie making?

I don't think the Wachowskis tried to hide that they borrowed some of the visual style from Dark City - in fact, the rooftop that Trinity runs over at the beginning of The Matrix was a set *from* Dark City.

The underlying similarity, though, is because both are based on Gnosticism. Neo and John Murdoch are both the gnostic archetype of the person who realizes the true nature of the world, and so is able to control it. In one of the Matrix sequels, there is even a reference to a ship called the Gnosis.

The matrix' is perhaps Dickian, but Dick isn't a 'straight' gnostic himself. They both propagate more like a mix of gnostism and hermetism. Using science to 'crack open the world' is much more a hermetic practice than it is typical for gnostics. The matrix has even more obvious hereticism in it than most of Dicks novels ('as above, so below' for instance: die in the matrix and you die in the real world).

Then there is the fact that gnosticism isn't unchristian in itself; there have been gnostic christians throughout the history of the religion, lots of them in the early period (before orthodox christians wiped them out) some of them in the medieval period (like the french cathars, also wiped out by fellow christians), some in the enlightment (like William Blake) and there is a growing number of gnostic christians today. Of course most of those christian gnostics form the past where burned at the stake for heracy, but so where lots of protestants.

Bravo! Bravo! well done. If god was indeed a just and caring god then why as in the old testament does he set upun us Floods
Floods and plagues and ordered the execution of innocent woemen and children in a seemingly arbitrary maner?

You're right - check out http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/nhlcodex.html

So a deity that rapes a 13 year old (Mary), then impregnates her is ok?

She didn't seem to mind...

So since you wanna "assume" then what about the other god's other people have written about

This is a much more interesting attack than the ones you were making earlier. The Bible is actually far more internally consistent than you give it credit for, especially when you use such pathetic examples. You'd be far better off with your latest strategy: pointing out the many religious beliefs around the world and their sometimes subtle yet major differences.

You touched briefly on it before with your Nag Hamadi link, but it might also do you good to address the notion of "the Bible" as a monolithic entity, along with the fact that a council of sinful men took it upon themselves to announce to the masses exactly what the perfect God did or did not say, and exactly which directions of thinking were and were not to be allowed. A final point of interest is that the different councils came up with different sets of "acceptable" writings.

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Jesus mistakenly tells his followers that he will return and establish his kingdom within their lifetime. Mt.16:28, 23:36, 24:34

Jesus falsely prophesies that the high priest would see his second coming. Mt.26:64, Mk.14:62.

Jesus falsely prophesies that the end of the world will come within his listeners' lifetimes. Mk.9:1, 13:30

Jesus falsely predicts that some of his listeners would live to see him return and establish the kingdom of God. Lk.9:27

Now how about YOU read the Nag Hamadi, then come back to me when you see yourself what Jesus wrote and how it differs from all you "think" you know. Its a shame Catholics burnt so many scrolls once upon a time ago what were they hiding?

Don't preach it teach it.