This is excellent. Thank you for writing this up. It looks like you've gone inactive on nostr, but if you ever return, you'll have at least me as a reader.

I found this note after half-jokingly adding "pleroma" as a hashtag on something, then being curious what else might be published under it - then I found an argument between you and someone I'd already blocked - a guy that thinks he's representing Christianity by attacking everything he doesn't understand and making ridiculous assumptions. I'm so glad I blocked that guy... And, that was the guy that initially caused me to start investigating Gnosticism, because he tried insulting me by calling me a gnostic. Before, I had basically viewed Gnosticism as a weird version of Christianity.

It turns out, Christianity is the weird version of Gnosticism. And as more Christians said more rude things to me - one time I got screamed at by two guys in a Bible study, and I'm really not sure what set them off - as incidents kept happening, I looked more and more into what went wrong in the early church, and that led me to gnostic stuff.

I wouldn't say I'm a "gnostic" - that can mean anything - but I'm more open to what they have to say than what the abusive Christians are saying.

If you ever come back to nostr, I'd like to know more about Gnosticism before Christianity. My best guess right now would be some kind of Ptolemaic Hermeticism, but you said explicitly that it isn't hermetic.

Anyways, good read, glad I found this.