Just wanted to mention that this is probably this forums is a good place to continue a discussion if you suspect Gnosticweb of being a cult.

I think it might be helpful for people involved in the Gnostic Movement or Gnosticweb Lead by Mark Pritchard who calls himself Belzebuub to think of the meaning of the word Objective.

He encourages people to be objective however in at least one place he claims that "true objectivity comes from the esense". For the sake of this discussion I would say that this means it come from soul or who the idividual trully is. This sounds to me like a confusion between objective ans subjective thinking or learning.

The Oxford Dictionary defines Objective as being "not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing" Contrasted with Subjective.

Personally I see the believe system taught by Mark H. Pritchard it makes it pretty hard for people to be objective since it is such a narrow way to look at the world.

I had meant to include this in my other post.

[forums.astraldynamics.com]

I was the one who started that post, after I noticed disgusting behavior and oppinions on their website.

I left the group when I read a post a girl made, who was only 15. (I'm 18). She asked if she should quit school because of 2012, and she said to her mother "you're just my Earth mother".

Gnosticweb also claims that gay people are "malignant creatures. All doors are closed for these creatures"

One of the users there said that gay people seemed nice and friendly on the outer shell, but that inside they were damned. They seemed so happy, but really °the path to hell is lined with roses"

i made a post saying "angels can fly because they take themselves lightly", but they didn't understand.

I made another post

[www.gnosticweb.com]

I said (near the end of the post) that Ariel the Little Mermaid wanted to become a human, just like they wanted to become °spiritual beings". She sold her voice to a witch in the process.

They're really hypocritical, because they said that the egos make us follow blindly, and that we mustn't go along with the egos.

I lost my patience and bombarded their youtube sites and forums with cult warning messages. They all got deleted. And I have made and had deleted about four accounts

They even moniter the comments for their youtube videos, pretty much every day.

It makes me sick. The bad thing is that many of the users there are kids.

I looked on the forums and there is only 1 message remaining there asking "are you guys brainwashed", and they carefully said that Gnosticweb has no cultish behavior.

I've heard of Eckankar. Is this worse?

Frankly, I think I've seen the bad side of the New Age Spectrum

I have jumped from Osho to A Course in Miracles to hypnosis to What the Bleep Gnosticweb. I had to conquer solipsism syndrome and depersonalization/derealization after this, because of all the nonsense.

I also have dealt with James Randi's harsh oppinions as well, but I don't want to be either extreme (too skeptical or too superstitious). I think this is a good place to post this. But I think I can unleash a storm of Randi skeptics onto Gnosticweb and see what happens.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 02/04/2009 05:52PM by Free_955.

sorry double post



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 02/04/2009 05:49PM by Free_955.

Dear Free, if you've not yet found this article, it might be worth a look..

The author was a New Age teacher and healer who eventually left. She wrote that part of what made it hard for her to learn from the skeptics was that all too often they tended to write in a painfully harsh manner. And she wrote this while making it clear she had come to value their perspective and had crossed over to their side.

[www.csicop.org]

Bridging the Chasm between Two Cultures

(a very tiny excerpt)

Quote

I'm writing this piece as a thank you letter to the skeptical community.

....

I'm also writing as an attempt to open a dialogue, and perhaps to begin bridging the precipitous chasm that exists between our two warring cultures, (skeptics vs New Age)because at this point, the lion's share of people from my culture can't really hear much (if anything) from the skeptical culture.

And that's a real shame.

...

The fight between our cultures has often been an ugly and confusing one, and in all honesty, that fight can't be won the way we're fighting it. I'm tired of seeing so many people get hurt when so little good comes of that hurt. So I'm going to try something new, and I'm going to try to find a way to expiate the damage I feel I've done. But first I need to find the words to tell people in my culture (the New Age) what I'm doing and why.

Sadly, though, every time I tried to research the things that disturbed or troubled me, I hit a wall.

That wall, built of deep cultural differences and decades (or centuries) of distrust, meant that I could find nothing within my culture that could help me think critically

. Critical thinking and skepticism live in another world from mine-they live across a chasm where no bridge and no safe passages exist. It wasn't until I became a citizen of the Web that I was able to undertake the harrowing journey across that chasm and land, finally, on solid ground.

How did a card-carrying, aura-wearing, chakra-toting leader of the New Age become able to understand and eventually embrace the skeptical culture? Well, it took quite a while, so let me start at the beginning. ....

Quote

To be fair, a skeptical movement did arise during my early teens, but it unfortunately created a deep cultural rift that continues to this day. In the seventies, Uri Geller became popular. My first real contact with someone in the skeptical culture was watching James Randi on television, just tearing Geller to bits. I didn't understand what was happening. Uri Geller appeared on the Mike Douglas show and on the Merv Griffin show, and you could clearly see him perform his paranormal feats right there on television. Surely Mike and Merv wouldn't be involved in lying to the public? I really didn't understand what Randi's problem was with Geller, and my friends and I thought Randi was very vitriolic. I didn't learn about critical thinking from Randi - what I learned was that some people just had it in for healers and people with paranormal gifts. I know he would not like to hear this, but it's still true: James Randi's behavior and demeanor were so culturally insensitive that he actually created a gigantic backlash against skepticism, and a gigantic surge toward the New Age that still rages unabated.

I certainly understand and support James Randi's anger, frustration, and even vitriol now (especially after having lived through the New Age for so many decades), but all I could see then was a very sarcastic man who seemed to attack Geller personally.

Now, after having been a regular visitor to Randi's Web site (www.randi.org), I can see him as a deeply caring man who works tirelessly for an important cause. I also see that he is very concerned about some of the unbalanced New Agers who write to him in barely legible missives.

I empathize with Randi, because people like that write to me, too (though I take on the role of hero in their fevered fantasy lives, while Randi is treated as a villain).

Now that I can see him as an individual and understand his culture, I can see James Randi as the excellent (and intense) man he is-but it took me a while.

Had Randi understood the New Age culture back when Uri Geller was becoming popular, he could have easily spoken in a way that might have been heard - or at least in a way that wouldn't have caused such a violent backlash. Or perhaps I'm being too idealistic.

Part of this thread might be a good read.

[forum.culteducation.com]

One concept to ponder is Cultic Milieu--the entire social venue in which various New Age groups float and in which people may be socialized to give up or devalue critical thinking and even learn to glamorize power when exercised by gurus and to despise anyone who reports being harmed ("you are wallowing in victim mentality")

Time and again Ive notice a bias in which compassion is extended only to powerful gurus and compassion is denied and with held from persons victimized by gurus who misuse their power.

Am convinced the toxic New Age scene *talks* about love but secretly and unconsciously worships power and thrills to power imbalance.

Hi Free_955,

Glad to see you came here, I was trying to join the discussion at astraldynamics but I didn't get my activation email. You should also read the other forums which relate to the garbage teachings of "Samael Aun Woer". That guy was a real jerk.

I think you will find information about Eckankar on this website, from what I have seen and heard it isn't good. There is plenty of sensible, practical spirituality out there, but you need to find what is right for yourself. I feel that I am just starting my process of research.

In regards to the New Age movement, I feel it is very common for them to missappropriate nonwestern culture. The Gnostic Movement and the teachings of the man who called himself Samael Aun Weor are full of that. You mentioned the 2012 date. People who focus on that assume that it is a Maya date of change of some kind, but non of them have bothered to do the research. The ancient Maya were no where near as accurate as people believe and there was no expectation of the world ending.

Heres a good article about it [www.flixya.com] It is a long article but reading some of it will be helpful, it is written by an Maya expert.

Personally I like the wording of critical thinking as opposed to skypticism. Skypticism seems to have a bias towards being negative towards what you are looking at. there also appears to be an atheist bias in the skyptic community. Thanks for those comments on Skypticism corboy that would be quite helpful for me to take a look at.

I have been reading I don't believe in Atheists by Chris Hedges. He is really great, as a social commentator he takes a stand against all extremist, he wrote another book called American Fascists.

Be aware that Mark Pritchard (the man who fantacizes about being Belzebuub) claims to dislike the new age movement despite the fact that he acts like a new age guru in many ways, Just one who says all the others are evil.

Free_955 let me know if you need any more information about Gnosticweb.

Its great there is a discussion here now about the Gnostic Movement, as well as at Astraldynamics, as they seem to be able to shut down criticism in so many places.

I looked up the two disorder you mentioned having after leaving Gnosticweb,


both are from Wikipedia,

Solipsism

Denial of materialist existence, in itself, is not enough to be a solipsist. Possibly the most controversial feature of the solipsistic world view is denial of existence of other minds. We seemingly can never directly know another's mental state. Qualia, or personal experience, are private and infallible. Another person's experience can be known only by analogy.

Philosophers try to build knowledge on more than an inference or analogy. The failure of Descartes's epistemological enterprise brought to popularity the idea that all certain knowledge may end at "I think therefore I am" (cogito ergo sum).[1]

The theory of solipsism also merits close examination because it relates to three widely held philosophical presuppositions, which are themselves fundamental and wide-ranging in importance. These are that:

1. My most certain knowledge is the content of my own mind—my thoughts, experiences, affects, etc..
2. There is no conceptual or logically necessary link between mental and physical—between, say, the occurrence of certain conscious experience or mental states and the 'possession' and behavioral dispositions of a 'body' of a particular kind (see the brain in a vat);
3. The experience of a given person is necessarily private to that person.

Solipsism is not a single concept but instead refers to several world views whose common element is some form of denial of the existence of a universe independent from the mind of the agent.

Depersonalization

Individuals who experience depersonalisation feel divorced from both the world and from their own physicality by acting as a completely different identity.[2] Often a person who has experienced depersonalization claims that life "feels like a movie" or things seem unreal or hazy. Also a recognition of self breaks down (hence the name). Depersonalization can result in very high anxiety levels, which further increases these perceptions.[3]

One way to describe the physical manifestation of the feeling is to compare it to a film technique called the vertigo shot or dolly zoom. In this technique, the subject of the picture stays fixed on the shot while all the surrounding background is pulled away, providing a sense of vertigo or detachment. People may perceive this feeling in a cyclical manner, where the feeling is experienced back-to-back in succession.

I can relate to this as I felt some degree of it. I think it is very common from what I have seen. People involved in this Movement preach about awareness but have difficulty functioning on a day to day basis from what I saw being around them.

It is interesting that they deflect their own mental illness by putting down others that they see as mentally ill or who mind even be diagnosed thinking they have been over taken by egos, and are on a downward spiral because of lust in previous life's.

A tactical suggestion:

If this set up is active in California, get the word to the gay media that their internal policies are homophobic.

People in California are already annoyed that the resources of two wealthy major religions (Roman Catholicism and the Church of Latter Day Saints/Mormons) donated beaucoup buck to the Yes on 8 proposition that struck down lega, same sex civil marriages in California.

So the progressive community might welcome a well done article on homophobic cults operating in the state.

Hi corboy,

How would you suggest contacting the progressive community in California? The Gnostic Movement / Gnosticweb have a centre in Berkeley. I believe they just got a bigger location.

We have a similar situation in Toronto where the Gnostic Movement centre is actually not that far from the Gay village.

The way they talk about homosexuality is very disguised and implied. They believe they have compassion for homosexuals who are "de-evolving" and will likely be reborn as pigs or monkeys, because they are so lustful. This is also their reasoning for not eating pork, but it is really just an imitation of Judaism.

The supposed compassion they feel for homosexuals is in fact just judgment in disguise.


How disgusting this is since real Gnosticism is open to homosexuality. I hope people will understand that.

Find out the name of the newspaper published by and for the gay community in your area. They'd be the ones to contact in case one of their journalists is interested in doing a story.

For example in London, UK the relevant publication would be The Pink Paper.

Its pretty hilarious that this group is homophobic, given that gnosticism flourished in Hellenistic and Roman times and where Orthodox Christianity had not yet emerged to marginalize and demonize same sex relationships.

Lust is lust, whether its for money and power, or sex. If you want to preach against lust, go after the fiscal pornographers on Wall Street.

They've done more harm than anyone who is content with mere shtupping between consenting adults.

Folks who chase after big d--cks have done infinitely less harm to society than incompetant bank CEOs chasing after obscenely big bonuses.



End of moralistic rant. Time for beddy bye.