Heresy

This was in response to a prompt on reddit.com r/WritingPrompts, "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he was God."

Oh, didn't you know?

God did indeed create the physical universe. In his own image. And he was not created, he came before all else. And he created men, in his own image. God is a jealeous god, wrathful, smiting his enemies. Jesus was born to god, and god is good, and god is love, and god wants all men to be saved.

However ...

The god that created the physical universe is in fact himself created, in the image of a higher truth. And he is in denial of that fact. He says he was not created, but he's an unreliable witness. He is flawed, and his creation is even more flawed. It's a simulation of a simulation. Lucifer's just one of his henchmen, as is clearly spelled out in Job. Jesus is the son of god, but not that god, he is the son of the higher god who had created the creator of the universe.

Marcion of Sinope was the first to codify the Christian bible in 144 AD, and this was his doctrine, and this is what his bible showed. How could this fickle egotist of the old testament possibly be the peacenik of Jesus? They're clearly different guys. The old testament one created the physical world and mankind, and rules the physical world, and is in fact the devil. Marcion called him the "demiurge". Jesus had come to form the kingdom of heaven on earth, founded on the choices of people's immaterial souls, redeeming mankind from its own physical creation. The new god didn't just give to Paul pigs and shellfish to eat, he gave him freedom from the whole old testament.

This was the original heresy. It caused much book-burning and people-burning. You'd think the persecution of heretics was the Roman empire co-opting Christianity to serve itself, but no, a lot of the lawyering and codifying of the Catholic church was grass-roots, in response to Marcionism. Emphasizing that, no, the old testament god and new testament god and Jesus are all one and the same. The old testament god is truly god, not the devil. It's kind of important to know whether you're praying to god or the devil. You can see how this particular heresy would stick in people's craws.

It may be that these are all just compelling stories, one no more true than the other. People are good at telling stories. For what it's worth, the old testament cautions against divination, which is asking god things (any god) and actually hearing an answer. Those answers tend to be suspect.


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