I made the argument almost two decades ago that the ancient Gnostics were some of our first and still some of our most radical theorists of religion, particularly in their rejection of the moral monstrosities of the biblical God and their dramatic reversal of key religious assumptions: God did not make us—we made God, the serpent was a figure of gnosis not of temptation, and so on.48 I still think that this is the case. If you want to take religion critically but seriously, to take it apart (and have something deeply meaningful left over), there is no better place to begin than with the
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