“Tradition civilizes us, education perfects us,” said Confucius (551-479 BCE). Gnosophia.org’s principal goal is to teach Gnosophy, and the person who has mastered gnosophy is a gnosophist. That is one definition of a Gnosophist but it reveals very little as it requires one to know what Gnosophy is. To give a more comprehensive definition of a Gnosophist, consider the following questions:
- Do you want to attain your intellectual and spiritual potential?
- Do you have confidence in yourself?
- Do you love yourself?
- Do you believe in yourself?
- Do you want to value science and use it as a tool for improving human well-being?
- Can you exceed your intellectual and spiritual horizon?
- Are you ready to learn a discipline that combines science, logic, geopolitics, politics, mathematics, and theology?
- Do you want to know where you came from, why you are here, and where you are going?
- Do you want to know how to manage chaos in your personal life and public life?
Here is how I came up with gnosophy.
Learning Sparks Revolutionary Thought
“The First World War was a totally worthless war. It killed the nice God and set the stage for the Second World War that buried the Judaeo-Christian God”, my father told me when he bought me a tome about world history during my second year in high school. “Study history and learn how humans created disasters, while those who had the capacity to prevent such disasters were either powerless, lazy, or rejected by a conformist society”, he advised me after loudly reading the first page of the book to me. The book I am talking about is Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (1983) by Paul Johnson. I still have that book to this day.
During the late 1990s, my father was attracted to the teachings of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness – one of the cults that I have reviewed in 77 Bizarre, Queer, and Secret Cults. My mother would have none of this as she despised Hinduism and regarded it as the most anti-intellectual and backward religion that exists today. My mother eventually forced my father to take a Christian theology course which she hoped would strengthen his faith and push him away from what she described as Eastern paganism. “What do we share with these people, nothing!!! Have these Hindus ever achieved the civilizational glory similar to that of the British Empire, Roman Empire, or the Great Greek Civilization?” she always retorted when anyone tried to defend Eastern religions.
In high school, my history teacher was equally scornful of Eastern religions. She taught us about the Taiping Revolution and used it to discredit the backwardness, paganism, and intellectual stagnation of all non-Christian Eastern Religions practiced in Qing China. This revolution was marked by a revolutionary war.
In this revolutionary war, the Christian revolutionary, Hong Xiuquan, rallied 34,000 poor underfed peasants to take up homemade weapons and march against the 3.4-million-strong army of the Qing Empire in 1850. By 1853, these peasants had defeated the Qing Army in South-Eastern China, captured the Imperial City of Nanjing (the Emperor fled the city), and established the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. By 1860, the Qing Army was no more and the Qing Royalty had to rely on militia to survive. Have you ever read about the Taiping Revolution? It was not even in my high school curriculum and neither was it examinable, but my teacher was deeply aroused by this revolution, and she passed these emotions to us as her students. A few years ago, I researched the Taiping Revolution and concluded that Hong Xiuquan had adopted a Gnostic version of Christianity. I cover this issue in The Taiping Gnostics: The Revolutionaries Who Almost Destroyed Imperial Confucianism.
The benefit of studying history is that I understand what happens when a religion, movement, organization, or cause is handed over to the wrong leader. Let us consider the Theosophical Society.
Charles Webster Leadbeater inherited the Theosophical Society during its zenith of organizational stability, mainstream acceptance, and intellectual vitality. The innovative teachings of Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky – including the idea about the root races, white lodge, black lodge, right-hand path, left-hand path, ascended masters, and evolution of being – had been refined and syncretized with Gnostic and Freemasonic ideas so as to achieve a level of philosophical agility that allowed for their mainstream acceptance. Initially, Leadbeater managed the Theosophical Society fairly well but appointed the wrong successor, Jiddu Krishnamurti. It is Krishnamurti who squandered the resources of the Theosophical Society and then abandoned it. Today, the Theosophical Society exists but as a former shadow of itself. My father considered the Theosophical Society to have started wrongly, especially its adoption of the idea of the noble savage which drove its founders to seek “wisdom” among the anti-rationalist traditions of the Indian subcontinent.
This obsession with Indian wisdom was not limited to the occult revival in continental Europe. Mainstream philosophers used the appeal to ancient Aryan knowledge to gain the attention of the cultural elite and modernist bourgeoisie. It is that philosopher of pessimism and lover of Upanishads, Arthur Schopenhauer who made Indian teachings popular among the German intellectuals.
In Nietzschean Blond Angels, I explain how this obsession with “ancient pristine Aryan knowledge” led to the misunderstanding of the ubermensch (or superman) described by the famed philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche criticized Christianity, Judaism, and Anti-Semitism, but he never called for a wholesale religious return to the pre-Christian past. In fact, Nietzsche wanted the German philosopher-warrior to study and train so as to achieve a level of intellectual and physical refinement that would elevate him to become an ubermensch who was equal to the Christian angel. This would endow the ubermensch with the capabilities to guide the evolution of humanity to its next stage of development and thus overcome the death of the Judaeo-Christian God that he described in The Gay Science.
Instead, the teachings of Nietzsche were misinterpreted and pathologized by adherents of Armanism and Ariosophy who inverted the Nietzschean goals. This resulted in German men being taught by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP/NAZI) that an ubermensch was a murderous anti-Christian brute whose highest ideal was to kill, maim, and brutalize the non-Aryan people. There still exists remnants of these perverse ideologies today including the Order of Nine Angels, Church of Aryanity, and Aryan Nations and vestiges of its defunct offshoots such as The Order and The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord. In Holy Sumerians – Autonym and Identity, I explain that Sumerians – a non-Aryan people – created the mother civilization and these people taught against what is now described as perennial philosophy – the idea that all human knowledge existed in the past in a pure form. In my book, Holy Sumerians: The Extinct Non-Semitic, Non-Aryan Founders of Western Civilization and Abrahamic Religions, I explain why perennial philosophy is wrong and why we need to constantly evolve our thinking as our repertoire of knowledge increases.
The rise of postmodernism allowed for a modicum of rehabilitation of Friedrich Nietzsche and his ideas. (Another philosopher whom the postmodernists rehabilitated is Martin Heidegger from whom I derived the concept of Theosein). It is the perversion of German Idealism, corruption of philosophical ideas, and appeal to perennial philosophy that inspired me to start Gnosophy. Another reason for me to start Gnosophy is to combat pseudo-science, anti-science, and epistemophobia that has taken root in modern Gnosticism (also called neo-Gnosticism) which has resulted in this movement being the refuge for neo-nazis, religious extremists, and anti-science people who believe that the earth is flat and human beings can survive by drinking water, getting sunshine, and breathing air.
Atheism and Scientism
In Defense of Atheism and Secular Humanism, I explain that atheism benefited humanity by weakening the tyrannical hold of superstitions over the institutions of knowledge production, thus allowing rationality and science to dominate the study of natural sciences, especially life sciences, which resulted in longer human lifespans and a higher quality of life. The use of formal logic and proofs to validate knowledge served to empower humanity to advance intellectually, socially, economically, politically, and psychologically. This was accompanied by the weakening of religious institutions and the power structures that it sustained, especially the monarchies and caliphates.
The Ottoman Caliphate was disbanded by the atheist Mustafa Kemal Atatürk who established Republican Turkey and his ideas have survived in modern Turkey as Kemalism. The Russian Tsar Nikolai II Alexandrovich Romanov and his royal family were eliminated by atheist Bolsheviks. With the loss of its power structures, organized religion steadily lost mass appeal. The loss of face by organized religion was so great in the 20th Century that religion had to use science to validate its claims.
To me, religion looking up to science for validation is a great achievement as it stalls the reactionary advance of unreason and anti-intellectualism, which ultimately results in dogmatic superstitions and political tyrannies. This need to seek validation from science extends to other domains of knowledge. Consider the popular series produced by Graham Hancock, Ancient Apocalypse. In this series, Hancock spends significant time and effort to criticize mainstream archaeology (he is not an accredited archaeologist), which is fine with me as long as evidence is produced to substantiate the criticism.
Equally, I do not subscribe to scientism because science cannot be a religion. However, science provides the best way to learn about the material universe, and it allows for the testing of a hypothesis so as to gain empirical knowledge. Unfortunately, scientific research can be politicized so as to achieve pre-determined goals. Gnosophy criticizes the string theory for its flawed theoretical framework. Besides, science can be used to promote biased agendas. Consider the scientific marketing of sugar and seed oils.
