User:Gnostrat

I live mostly in Derby, England. I am a Gnostic Christian by conviction, and have been ever since I read the debates between Simon Peter and Simon Magus in the Clementine literature and realised that Simon Magus got it right.

I'm also a sometime student of the biblical scholar Margaret Barker whose 'radically conservative' reinterpretation of Christian origins I broadly support. I have an abiding passion for comparative mythology and comparative religion, and my own spiritual odyssey through Hinduism, the Goddess scene, Wicca, Odinism, the Elim Pentecostal Church and Christian Identity (in roughly that order of succession) has led me to develop a generally positive interfaith outlook along with a particular fascination for unconventional religious movements and heterodox theologies.

Other interests include radical and fringe politics (particularly concepts with some imaginative power, like anarchism and third positionism, that refuse to fit the hackneyed old 'left' versus 'right' clichés); and anything connected in any way to Modern Human Origins research, including archaeology, paleoanthropology, archaeogenetics and comparative linguistics (especially the long-range hypotheses which connect language families that aren't generally supposed to be related).

I also keep a keen eye on developments in zoological, botanical, fungal and microbial taxonomy, though it's more of a hobby than a calling.

[edit] My editing policy

Wherever possible, respect the contributions of previous editors by writing 'around' them and not 'over' them.

[edit] What I've done for Wikipedia

Not a lot. Some more or less substantial edits to the following articles (both logged-in and anonymous). Actually, a few of them somewhat less than substantial. It's a start.

[edit] Linguistics

Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages • Eskimo-Aleut languages • Nostratic languages • Proto-Pontic language • Uralo-Siberian languages

[edit] Occult & Politics

(Well, do you know the difference?)

Anton Drexler • Germanenorden • Germanic mysticism • Guido von List Society • National-Anarchism • Nationalist anarchism • Nazi mysticism • Order of the New Templars • Richard Hunt (editor) • Rudolf Hess • Rudolf von Sebottendorf • Thule Society • Troy Southgate • Völkisch movement • Vril • White Order of Thule

[edit] Zoology & Taxonomy

Afrosoricida • Australosphenida • Ferungulata • Insectivora • Lancelet • Legion (biology)† • Linnaean taxonomy • List of chordate orders • Ornithorhynchidae • Paenungulata

[edit] Other

D. H. Lawrence • Legion (disambiguation)

† indicates articles I've created

[edit] Stuff that I have opinions about

[edit] Hitler and the Nazis

The early Catholic church ripped off its ideas from the diverse sects of early Christianity ('Gnostics') and reused them in a twisted form to justify building up a centralised hierarchical organisation run by control-freaking bishops. Once they had the power, they sidelined and then suppressed the looser and more creative movements that were the original source of their ideas. Hitler and the Nazis did exactly the same thing to the diverse groups of völkisch populists and nationalists that had been around in central Europe since the 19th century.

If you look past the cynical channeling of all things völkisch into organisations under Nazi control, the NSDAP really had a parasitic relationship with the völkisch movement. Hitler held much of it in contempt. There is almost no evidence to support the more specific and often-repeated claims that the guy with the moustache or other leading Nazis were involved in secret circles of völkisch occultists, and my policy on Wikipedia will be to chase down such unhistorical claims and to break or de-emphasise those links wherever the evidence (or lack of evidence) warrants it.

[edit] Race

Since I've been asked, and might get asked again, I am:

• a racialist since I'm convinced there is sufficient scientific evidence to justify a belief in the real, objective existence of biological human races - which also means racial differences, otherwise they cannot be defined at all. Such differences would necessarily involve inequalities in specific traits - though not overall inequality, which simply cannot be measured (there are too many variables).

• an anti-racist because I do not accept that racial (or any other biologically-based) differences can justify hating any human group on account of their differences from your own group, nor condoning social or legal disadvantages to any group within a mixed community, still less acts of genocide or the colonising of people whom you consider inferior.

Self-evidently, these are not contradictory positions. Real anti-racism would not poison minds with the message that "we're all the same under the skin", minimising biological differences and urging the whole planet into the melting pot, as though we could not accept or value people unless they were as similar as they can possibly get. The purveyors of sameness seem to have missed the point that anti-racism is about how we deal with people who are different, and it's a poor sort of anti-racism that can't handle that. (Some outright Nazis, whom I abhor on other grounds, seem to understand this better than the "hear no race, see no race, speak no race" brigade.) Racial, ethnic and cultural diversity constitute a wonderful human asset and long may those differences continue to bloom. NO to the racist melting pot!

Humans are, I concede, emotionally predisposed to prefer the company of their own biological, cultural and linguistic kith and kin. But there are circumstances (such as impending global ecological crisis) where we need to transcend those limited attachments and all pull together for everybody's well-being. This can best be achieved not by denial of difference but by learning to love it. If the world turned to desert and all humans were Eskimos, where would we be? If the world iced over and all humans were Bushmen, where would we be?

A final point. Opposing racial hatred is not the same thing as suppressing it, either by legislation or by Orwellian thought control. Political correctness is the mortal enemy of anti-racism because it leads to the inevitable racist backlash. One of the prices of a free society is that people are free to hate and free to express their hate. If somebody offends you, you can offend them back. Or you can choose to ignore them. Or you might try to enlighten them with measured and rational argument. Words can always be answered with words. As Nicolas Walter used to point out, the time to take action is when words lead to action - and not one minute sooner!

[edit] Judeo-Christianity and Pagan Christianity contrasted

These rival traditions - each a broad current composed of numerous sects - descended in parallel from at least the 1st to the 5th centuries of our era and influenced many later 'heresies'. (Catholics are a 2nd-century offshoot of Judeo-Christianity, watered down to accomodate Paul. Protestants are 'purist' Catholics.) The following table is not an exhaustive list of the differences by any means, but if you look down the right-hand column you should get a pretty good idea of where my sympathies lie over a whole range of beliefs.

[edit] Some Favourite Quotes

There is an eternal vital correspondence between our blood and the sun: there is an eternal vital correspondence between our nerves and the moon....The cosmos is a vast living body, of which we are still parts. The sun is a great heart whose tremors run through our smallest veins. The moon is a great gleaming nerve-centre from which we quiver forever....Now all this is literally true, as men knew in the great past, and as they will know again.

—D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse (artist, novelist and pagan)

Man will once more feel his unity with his fellows, he will feel his unity with the animals, with the mountains and the streams, with the earth itself and the slow lapse of the constellations, not as an abstract dogma of Science or Theology, but as a living and everpresent fact...The meaning of the old religions will come back to him. On the high tops once more gathering he will celebrate with naked dances the glory of the human form and the great procession of the stars, or greet the bright horn of the young moon which now, after a hundred centuries comes back laden with such wondrous associations - all the yearnings and the dreams and the wonderment of the generations of mankind - the worship of Astarte and of Diana, of Isis or the Virgin Mary.

—Edward Carpenter (utopian-socialist)

[Gnosis] leads us to the endless and perfect end, teaching us beforehand the future life we shall lead, according to God and with gods....and they are called by the appellation of gods, being destined to sit on other thrones with the other gods that have first been put in their places by the Saviour.

—Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies (Catholic Father and gnostic)

The Aryan spirit considers law to be evil and supports the rights of conscience.

—Dunbar Heath, On the Great Race-Elements in Christianity (19th-century anthropologist)

The most genuine Aryans, those who are most Aryan and most sure of their Aryanism are not anti-Semites...on the other hand, in the aggressive anti-Semite one can always detect certain Jewish traits even when his blood is free from any Semitic strain.

—Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (Jewish philosopher)

What the human being basically is, what his innermost secret, most inviolable possession is, that is the great community of living beings in him, that is his lineage, the commonality of his blood with that of all his ancestors.

—Gustav Landauer (German-Jewish völkisch mystical anarcho-nationalist revolutionary)