Traverse Fantasy

Last night, Instagram showed me a reel by @roseistheart : btw, the b*blical Adam & Eve story was taken from the ancient Sumerian myth, the tale of Enki & Ninhursag around 2000 BCE. the man eats the forbidden fruit and was told NOT to by the goddess. they flipped it around when adding it to abr*hamic books to push a patriarchal agenda, turning powerful goddesses & sacred serpents into villains, and a goddess who HEALED his rib into a woman made from his rib instead. Eve wasn’t the problem or secondary. she was the *superior* main character. Rose links to a World History Encyclopedia article about the goddess Ninhursag which goes into more detail about her myth with the god Enki and its confluence with the myth found in Genesis 2–3. The former is a very interesting one. If I may paraphrase the article: Enki fucks Ninhursag who gives birth to Ninsar; then Enki fucks Ninsar who gives birth to Ninkurra; then Enki fucks Ninkurra who gives birth to Uttu; then Enki fucks Ut...

Joseph B. Tyson argues in  Marcion and Luke–Acts: A Defining Struggle  that the canonical version of Luke's gospel and the heretical gospel of Marcion, which was supposed by some proto-orthodox writers to have been a mutilation of canonical Luke, in fact both derive from some earlier proto-gospel from which Marcion omitted some things and to which the author of canonical Luke–Acts added other things as a polemic against Marcionite theology. Based on the book, which I found mostly compelling and an interesting companion to James R. Edwards’  The Hebrew Gospel and the Development of the Synoptic Tradition  (which argues that Luke is based primarily on a now-lost gospel written in Hebrew, rather than being a synthesis of Mark and the hypothetical sayings compilation Q), I tried my hand at reconstructing what a draft n -1 of Luke's gospel might look like . It was a fun exercise and one which resulted in a very satisfying and thematically cohesive gospel narrative. I...

Jesus Christ. Am I some sort of influencer or thought leader that others both really follow my words and hold me responsible to their idea of them? I got a comment a few days ago while I was out: Why do you care so much about Paul? Religion is wrong and backwards. You are wasting your time. How is it possible to read Settlers and then come crawling back to fucking Christianity? Revolutionary communism is what’s true. Don’t you want to be part of the real movement to abolish the present state of things? Are you going to learn how to overthrow capitalism-imperialism from Paul? Please. First of all, this fucking rules and it genuinely made my day. I agree with Semiurge on one hand that that’s some coelacanth type shit, but it’s so refreshing for someone to call me a proverbial opium addict. I’m grinning ear to ear. Love it! Anyway. I thought since I guess it fucking matters, I would give a general update on where I’m at with things. Didn’t delete the blog. Just had an emotional c...

A lot of people who are culturally Christian are often surprised, I’ve noticed, to learn that the so-called “seven deadly sins” do not originate from the Bible. Certain Catholic monks from late antiquity—or the early Medieval era, take your pick—took it upon themselves to enumerate fundamental evil thoughts or wrong-doings. I know some of y’all love that shit. Can’t stand it. Enumeration. Love to put things in your little boxes. Well, here’s the history of the pursuit . I’m not going to recount it. Go be a monk if you want to! I think the idea that there could be any fundamental set of sins, some eigenspace of evil, is deeply misguided if not entirely missing the point. Chairman Paul loved to list the many ways in which people tend to be harmful or stupid, but he never did he suppose there to be any base “sin” except perhaps for idolatry (which contains more nuance than being the literal worship of idols, being more about how humans project artificial laws onto Nature , becoming blind...

There’s an idiom by which evangelicals refer to the Bible, namely the “Word of Gxd”, and they will read bits of the Bible referring to the Logos as being self-referential towards the Bible (never mind that the form in which we receive it is different from what the authors, who probably had not realized they were contributing to canon, would have had in mind). Then it occurred to me: wait a second, the Logos ? Are there any references to the Logos in the New Testament which are not either referring to the Logos qua ontological function or to logos qua reason (if not  logos  in its most basic, literal sense)? Keep in mind that the New Testament is addressed to the Hellenistic world which was well acquainted not only with the language in which the various authors were writing, but also probably (whether by being literate or via cultural osmosis) with the concepts of Greek philosophy which Christians were both competing with and borrowing from linguistically as Hellenized Me...

With help from James Bishop’s blog , I’ve compiled quotations from Paul which elaborate upon his understanding of Jesus’ life (a sort of mini-gospel): But when the fullness of time had come, Gxd sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. Galatians 4:4 (NRSVue) Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of Gxd, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures, the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be Son of Gxd with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the gentiles for the sake of his name, including you who are called to belong to Jesus Christ, to all Gxd’s beloved in Rome, who are called to be ...

I had a dream a few nights ago. Maybe you can help me. I was taking someone to a childhood favorite bakery of mine—not a real place, just in the dream—and I was very excited. However, no matter where I stood at the counter, the workers there would either ignore or heckle me while serving others. Eventually, even the other customers became frustrated that I was standing there even though I obviously wasn't welcome there. Some time passed, but then someone I understood to be the owner came out and apologized to me. He said that they might not have what I originally wanted—it was so busy and they were running out of goods, I remember in particular slices of cookie cake and a fried sheet cake which they iced like a donut and sliced into long rectangles, none of this making any sense—but that he was going to give me a box and I could pick out anything I wanted. I woke up and felt melancholy. A dream is a dream, but I understood intuitively what my mind was trying to communicate through ...

Previously, I submitted a working definition for gnosticism, an infamously vague category which typically serves to mark various doctrines as heterodox. These still have in my view a family resemblance, despite the exonymic nature of the term itself. There’s no minimum viable criteria to which all doctrines called gnostic can be reduced without shaving off the edges and possibly mischaracterizing many (or all ) of them. However, there are tendencies manifest in doctrines called gnostic, which distinguish them from others called orthodox, and we should think of these tendencies not as specific beliefs but as relations between a believer, their dogma, and their praxis. My earlier go was : that physical creation is a corrupt prison in which our souls are trapped, and that the goal of religion is to release our souls into a perfect immaterial realm where we’re free of material trappings and temptations But even my attempt to cast a wide net is too specific and thus fails to accomplish ...