Status Updates From الزندقة: ماني والمانوية

lol I needed to get that off my chest.

Everyone is going to have their own personal beliefs with bias, and I respect when people can own it. Imo Arjana would benefit from reading Pagels work and taking a note out of her book when it comes to organization and being able to separate 'looking at the evidence' and then qualifying your own personal opinion at the end - which can add value to the book imo

When I say 'bias' I don't mean it in a negative way, we all have biases.

To compare, what irritated me with Buying Buddha, Selling Rumi by Sophia Rose Arjana (though I liked the book) was that I could tell her personal religious beliefs were influencing the book, but she refrained from giving her personal opinion at all. I later looked up interviews from her to find out more about her personal beliefs -

**ESOTERICA is not aimed for novices like ReligionForBreakfast, but for instance, after reading Elaine Pagels' book on Gnosticism I can watch his content and follow along much more easily.

For YT channels, the ones I like (The content creators may or may not be religious, spiritual, but they are mainly just giving the historical facts, comes across as unbiased as possible) are:

1. ReligionforBreakfast *He is super clear, this is good for novices

2. LetsTalkReligion *I haven't been able to finish any videos by him, his accent puts me to sleep, but otherwise he seems good

3. ESOTERICA**

I'm not saying I completely agree with her, but I respect her ability as a historian to 'look at the evidence' without showing her own bias, though she was willing to give her own opinion at the end of the book.

**Her take is that if the Orthodox Christians had not organized a unified church and all the Christian sects remained loosely structured with a wide variation of interpretations, practices, Christianity might have completely disappeared like other ancient world religions.

And for her, who is drawn to Christianity, that would've been a shame (I'm paraphrasing her)

That while a novice reading her book may think she is pro-Gnosticism, she is actually glad the Orthodox Christians "won the race" so to speak**, but she believes in looking at the evidence and where religious authority came from.

What I respect is she gave her biased, personal opinion towards the end of the book and labelled it as her own opinion

With religion professors, they have training, and I always try to guess what their personal religious beliefs are (or what they identify with), see if I can pick up on any bias

With The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels, I was trying to guess and realized half way through I couldn't pin her. I looked it up and she does identify as Christian. Towards the v. end of The Gnostic Gospels she reveals her personal take

-Some are from actual Gnostics, people who strongly believe in it, and even show animosity towards Christians

-Christians, who are viewing and talking about it heavily through that lens. Often their audience will be Christians quoting the bible in the comments

-Unbiased (as possible) academics, they may or may not be spiritual, religious, but they make the effort to look at religion from an unbiased perspective

Right now my interest in religion is purely coming from a historical perspective, while trying to look up vids/podcasts about esoteric subjects, Gnosticism, even Manichaeism I get a mixture of results: