Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Starks's Bearing False Witness is somewhat tendentious when it comes to the " lost gospels ." These gospels are, too a great extent, " Gnostic " in character. The trait that characterizes gnosticism, in general, is that it is neither works nor faith that bring salvation, but knowledge . More specifically, it is usually secret knowledge, available only to spiritual adepts, that saves. And even more specifically, that knowledge is often held to be the knowledge that the physical world is a prison, trapping the adept in his or her body, and blocking the adept from realizing the soul's true nature, as a resident of a better, divine realm. Gnostic texts often described an elaborate metaphysics of this imprisonment, involving multiple levels of divine beings. In particular, one divine being, the demiurge , had fallen from the Pleroma , essentially gone mad, and created a prison -- the physical world -- in which he could entrap other spiritual beings and garner...

"The crystallographer J. D. Bernal (1901-71) illustrates how Gnostic ideas infuse modern science. At one time ranked among Britain's most influential scientists… he was convinced that science could effect a shift in evolution in which human beings would cease to be biological organisms… Further in the future, he envisioned 'an erasure of individuality and mortality' in which human beings would cease to be distinct physical entities... 'consciousness itself might end or vanish in a humanity that has become completely etherealised, losing the close-knit organism, becoming masses of atoms in space communicating by radiation, and ultimately perhaps resolving itself entirely into light.'" -- John Gray, The Soul of the Marionette , pp. 14-15