Science is not a closed source of knowledge as contrasted to revealed religions. Science allows its axioms and fundamental truths to be tested so that they can either be proved or falsified. By contrast, revealed religions present themselves as closed sources of knowledge that humans need for this life and the afterlife, and their dogmatic ideas cannot be subject to tests.
Antony Kagirison
“What is good for a person can be bad for the community and what is good for the community can be bad for an individual”, my father always told me when I tried to explain new ideas I had learned.
I was born into a Christian family and I can state with conviction that Christianity has added very little value in my life despite me studying and implementing its principles in my life. When I joined university, I stumbled upon Judaism and immediately realized that it had a far superior theology than the Christianity that I had been taught and lived by. I loved Judaism within a month of discovering it, and have studied it for 15 years now.
Six years after discovering Judaism, I discovered Gnosticism by chance. I was listening to a shiur (religious lecture) by Rabbi Eliyahu Kin in which he mentioned the Gnostics. He described the Gnostics as people who claimed that God had created the world and then left it in the hands of human beings. This sparked my interest in these strange people called Gnostics, and one of my first questions was how they arrived at the conclusion that God no longer intervenes in human affairs or worldly affairs. At that time, I was studying Kabbalah and was familiar with Lurianic Kabbalah and its description of creation and emergence of evil.
When I studied Gnosticism, I immediately realized that Lurianic Kabbalah was based on Gnostic ideas. I quickly completed my studies on Kabbalah so that I could focus on Gnosticism. During my studies of Gnosticism, I came to realize that Freemasonry was also based on Gnosticism, though its Gnostic concepts reached it through Kabbalah which is well established in Freemasonic thought. I also realized that the G in Freemasonry can stand for God, Gnosis, Geometry, Gematria (Isopsephy), and/or the Great Architect of the Universe (GAOTU, who is analogically similar to the Platonic Demiurge).
This set me on the path to discovering the origins of Judaism, which is acknowledged as the first of the 3 mainstream Abrahamic religions. In The Madman Who Founded Judaism, I focus on how Ezekiel developed Judaism into a monotheistic religion and how his sharp criticisms and condemnations of priestly rites were designed to disassociate Judaism from the monolatry of the Ancient Israelite religion without voiding the need for the Temple of Jerusalem.
I came to the realization that revealed religions were basically plagiarism and libel of philosophers, sages, and revolutionaries. However, this realization created a new question: why was religion important to man? Can man live without religion?
