BY LETTER
Escapist Gnosticism
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An offshoot of gnosticism that shares most of the tenets of the Universal Freedom Gnostics (UFGs), but applies them in a much more benign form. They believe that the material universe is evil and seek to escape into the spiritual universe. However, death is no release as conscious beings are constantly being reincarnated. Only when the material universe no longer supports conscious beings can any truly escape.
Instead of seeking to hasten the end of material existence as UFGs do Escapist Gnostics seek to travel to it. Since the advent of reactionless drives Escapist Gnostics have been placing themselves in stasis and launching starships at ever-increasing relativistic speeds into the interstellar and eventually intergalactic voids. They wish to remain in stasis while their ships rush into the future and the heat death of the universe, where finally when all things fail they believe they shall be freed from this universe.
UFGs reportedly consider Escapist Gnostics optimists and cowards who trust to fate to deliver them to freedom while leaving so many fellow conscious beings in the past. More conventional Gnostics consider the Escapist Gnostics to be simply misguided, as most Gnostics believe it is through personal enlightenment that one escapes from the physical.
Related Articles
- Cosmognosticism - Text by M. Alan Kazlev
Generic pantheistic or acosmist religious cosmology or philosophy popular in parts of the Sophic League which explains the universe in terms of a long series of emanations from a transcendent Godhead. Not world negating in the sense of classical gnosticism, although it shares the same baroque vision of spiritual planes of existence, gods, archetypes, and worlds beyond worlds. - Cybergnosticism - Text by Anders Sandberg in Transhuman Terminology
The belief that the physical world is impure or inefficient, and that existence in the form of "pure information" is better and should be pursued. - Gnosticism, Classical
- Universal Freedom Gnostics (UFGs)
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Development Notes
Text by Glen Finney
Initially published on 11 October 2004.
Initially published on 11 October 2004.
