The Gnostics were rapidly driven out of business by the hierarchical orthodox Christians.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Organized Christianity has probably done more to retard the ideals that were its founder's than any other agency in the world.
The historical orthodox Christian faith is extremely wide and diverse.
It is only the forcible propagation of conventional Christianity that makes the agnostic so bitter toward the church. He knows that all the doctrines cannot possibly be true, but he would view them with toleration if he were asked merely to let them alone for the benefit of the masses whom they can help and succour.
My father was an agnostic.
What survived as orthodox Christianity did so by suppressing and forcibly eliminating a lot of other material.
My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not about God alone, but agnosticism about everything.
I don't think I've ever been an agnostic. I've always thought there's a superior power, that this is not the real world and that there's a world to come.
I grew up in an agnostic broad-minded family.
Christianity began as a religion of the poor and dispossessed - farmers, fishermen, Bedouin shepherds. There's a great lure to that kind of simplicity and rigor - the discipline, the call to action.
Jesus made clear that the Kingdom of God is organic and not organizational. It grows like a seed and it works like leaven: secretly, invisibly, surprisingly, and irresistibly.