5. The Antichrist: My old teacher is a Gnostic like me?

well, not so much in practice, I am sure. But in agreement, I think we both fall along the same line.

Now that I reread and reconsider my old teacher, I realize that Organised religion, is to him, the antichrist.

This is what my old teacher speaks of Jesus, "not to "redeem" mankind but to demonstrate how one ought to live...evangelic equal right of everyone to be a child of God which Jesus had taught...what came to end with the death on the Cross: a new, an absolutely primary beginning to a Buddhistic peace movement, to an actual and not merely promised happiness on earth."

Thus my old teacher is Gnostic, like me at our core. His words speak of Jesus as a "Free Agent". He, like me, wants man to be able to reach his full potential (though of course, we are in disagreement over what the above mentioned "full potential" entails).

Then he says of organized religion.

Because born out of the need to keep their followers and maintain power over them, organised religion has need of the tools of "Morbid barbarism" which teach/ condition man to feel quilt and inward (instead of outward through the exercise of his rationality). Such man then need the

The priestly class also exalted "Jesus in an extravagant fashion, in severing him from themselves....the one God and one son of God." and left themselves as the crucial bridge upon which the rest must then depend on.

This is in line with the semantic power that the priestly class sought to maintain in Latin, the "holy language". Foucault and Said would agree on this point of power distancing and monopolisation of the tools of knowledge and representation.

And then my old teacher carries on with strength and strikes out at "proof by potency."

"Belief makes blessed; therefore it is true...but with that we have already reached the end of the argument...the experience of all severe, all profound intellects teaches the reverse. Truth has to be fought for every step of the way, almost everything else dear to our hearts...greatness of the soul is needed for it; the service of truth is the hardest service...one despises 'fine feelings', that one makes every Yes and No a question of conscience!"

My old teacher is a Gnostic philosopher. :)