Anti-Gnostic Reading List

Here is a brief reading list of authoritative source materials I have found very useful and informative that provide intellectual ammunition against Leftism as a form of modern Gnosticism. It is not meant to be exhaustive or the final words on this subject.

Murray Rothbard’s Karl Marx: Communist as Religious Eschatologist, is the most definitive analysis and destructive weapon against the ideas of Marx and the Left. Rothbard traces the malevolent historic legacy of the Left as no one before. Particular note his brilliant discussion of Reabsorption Theology.

Modernity Without Restraint: The Political Religions, The New Science of Politics, and Science, Politics, and GnosticismThree seminal books by Eric Voegelin. Voegelin was one of our most distinguished political philosophers. This marvelous collection provides the best introduction to the study of gnostic political religions, especially as it applied to National Socialism and Communism. Here it is in .pdf format.

The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, by Hans Jonas. This work is an excellent study of the key principles of gnosticism.  The history, evolution and thought of the ancient gnostics is dealt with in a clear, unbiased manner. With the increasing interest in this subject in recent years, the origins of gnosticism make the book a great addition to any library. Here it is in .pdf format. 

Gnostic America: A Reading of Contemporary American Culture & Religion According to Christianity’s Oldest Heresy, by Peter M Burfeind. Burfeind builds off the foundations of Hans Jonas, Denis de Rougement, Norman Cohn, Eric Voegelin, Carl Jung, and Harold Bloom, each of whom saw the effects of Gnosticism in contemporary American (and Western) life. He explores the spiritual mechanisms going on behind everything from transgenderism to so-called “contemporary worship,” from the deconstructionist movement to the role pop music and media have in our culture, from progressive politics to the Emergent Church. Particularly challenging is Burfeind’s claim that both progressivism and Neo-evangelicalism — seemingly at odds in the “culture wars” — actually share the same Gnostic roots. His viewpoint here is definitively shaped by Murray N. Rothbard’s path-breaking research on the Progressive Era. Burfeind’s book is a tour de force through contemporary rock, pop, movies, television, politics, and religion showing how many of the values driving these cultural elements are informed by the ancient esoteric teachings of Gnosticism. Burfeind marshals a ton of surprising evidence to make his case, taking us through ancient and Medieval history, through the Enlightenment and Romantic periods, to today.

Spirit Wars: Pagan Revival in Christian America, by Peter Jones. Peter Jones is the courageous Christian theologian who unmasked the neopagan pantheist Religious Left and its syncretistic, egalitarian vision of a Sophianic Millennium — the deification of humanity — in his powerful book, Spirit Wars: Pagan Revival in Christian America. 

The Pagan Temptation, by Thomas Molnar. Excellent companion to Spirit Wars; Molnar charts the continuous pantheist pagan influence throughout 2000 years of Western history, and confronts today’s assertive neopagan challenge.

Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties, by Paul Johnson.  This is Johnson’s massive, mammoth, and magisterial best-seller on world history. Modern Times, says the author, began on May 29, 1919, when photographs of a solar eclipse confirmed the truth of a new theory of the universe—Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Paul Johnson then describes the full impact of Freudianism, (don’t miss his fascinating discussion of Sigmund Freud as a gnostic and psychoanalysis as a gnostic endeavor), the establishment of the first Marxist state, the chaos of “Old Europe,” the Arcadian twenties and the new forces in China and Japan. Here are Keynes, Coolidge, Franco, the ’29 Crash, the Great Depression (Johnson carefully utilizes the path-breaking insights of Murray N. Rothbard and his book, America’s Great Depression, in fact he later contributed an introduction to an updated edition of this Rothbard classic), and Roosevelt’s New Deal. And there are the wars that followed—the Sino-Japanese, the Abyssinian and Albanian conflicts and the Spanish Civil War, a prelude to the massive conflict of World War II. The incredible repression and violence of the totalitarian regimes brought a new dimension to the solution of social and political problems, and in Germany, Russia and China we see this frightening aspect of the new “social engineering.”

Churchill, Roosevelt, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Hirohito, Mussolini and Gandhi are the titans of this period. There are wartime tactics, strategy and diplomacy; the development of nuclear power and its use at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the end of World War II and the harsh political realities of the uneasy peace that followed. The rise of the superpowers—Russia and the United States; the emergence of the Third World; the Marshall Plan and the Cold War; Tito, Nehru, de Gaulle, Eisenhower, Sukarno, Eden, Adenauer, Nasser, Ben Gurion and Castro are described. The book covers the economic resurgence of Europe and Japan; existentialism; Suez; Algeria; Israel; the New Africa of Kenya tta, Idi Amin and apartheid; the radicalizing of Latin America; the Kennedy years, Johnson and Vietnam, Nixon and Watergate, the Reagan years; Gorbachev and perestroika; Saddam Hussein and the Gulf War. And there are the Space Age, the expansion of scientific knowledge, the population explosion, religion in our times, world economic cycles, structuralism, genetic engineering and sociobiology. Here is the book in .pdf format.

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4:03 pm on August 30, 2020