As soon as the time of St. John the Apostle, the Gnostic heresy was already becoming the problem it has always been for the Christian Church. From Benjamin Wiker, we get new insights applicable to our times.

The new version of Gnosticism prevalent today “is rooted in modern science . . . and sees the human body itself – even the distinction of male and female – to be something that is fundamentally flawed and in need of transformation by human technology.”

“The heresy of Gnosticism had its origin in paganism but burst into full flower in its disruption of early Christianity. At its heart is a hatred of the material world, in particular, the human body.”

“Essentially Gnostics reject the Goodness of God and His creation, believing that the world and the flesh are irredeemable.”  An essential result of their hatred for the flesh is the rejection of the Incarnation; the refusal to accept that God could take on a human nature to redeem fallen man.

“For the new Gnosticism, God doesn’t exists and material reality is the only reality.  The material universe (not God) is eternal, and our world was created and continually formed and reformed by the fickle ministrations of chance.”

“The ancient Gnostic Supreme Being reenters in a new form: human beings themselves perform the function of the redeeming deity; their increasing technical power save humanity from the ill effect, the suffering, and the limitations of the human flesh; the scientist himself becomes the savior who reveal scientific knowledge – gnosis – that allows us to escape from the evils of the material world into a paradise of our own making.”

“The assumption of the new Gnostic is that he has been handed a work in progress, a work brought to an arbitrary and unsatisfying point by blind evolution, and that his most important task is to take this defective material (genetic or otherwise ) as his clay, and remold it according to the desired purposes.”

“We can therefore understand the endless excitement about fiddling with our genome, driven by the notion that all diseases and bad behavior our caused by our having been dealt a bad genetic hand.”

For the full development of this theme, please  go to The Catholic World Report, December 2010 for an excellent essay ‘The New Gnosticism: An ancient hatred of the material world takes many modern forms” by Benjamin Wiker.