Some gnostics saw the Creator God of the old testament as evil, and saw Jesus as sent by the Good god to show humanity how to escape from the evil god of this world.

There was a lot of variety in early Christianity.

The gnostic scriptures aren’t considered second-hand?

"it's tempting to see modern Christianity as being a faithful reflection of what Jesus did and said" - there's also the Council of Nicea a few hundred years later where people decided on the divinity of Jesus in a very political manner. It doesn't take too much looking at history to realise how much the nature of the religion is entirely a human story and whatever the nature of the Jesus (if he even existed) is probably unknowable by now.

You might find the Holy Grail traditions and the more recent Rosicrucian tradition interesting, if you're not already aware of them. These are, like Gnosticism, Western Esoteric schools. Esoteric, as in the in-group teachings, or occult (the hidden) teachings. I'm fascinated by all of it.

I'm currently into Rudolf Steiner, a highly-regarded Rosicrucian teacher that left behind many books that are available in English (he lived around 100 years ago), but his writings are sort of a dive off the deep end. They require a lot of open-mindedness, to say the least.

The "dark lords of the earth" who created the material world is a common theme: Steiner also called these the followers of Ahraman (misspelling that probably), they are then offset by the Luciferic beings (the light-bearers), who are on the opposite end of the spectrum. Both are considered similarly destructive in opposite ways. The former represents unbridled materiality, the latter unbridled spirituality. Then there are the middle beings, sometimes called the Michaelic, who embody the balance and thus are considered worthy guides. There's a holy image of Jesus on the cross with two thieves on either side, also crucified, one turning towards Jesus, the other away: this image is commonly interpreted as portraying this dark-balance-light framework.

Modern Christian teachings sort of reduce this three-point system into a simple duality of good and evil, light and dark: which completely misses the point of the earlier teachings. Both the dark can be too dark, and the light can be too bright, it's about the middle way. Or, in other words, light isn't necessarily good. Today Lucifer is associated with dark beings and is a synonym for Satan, which might be fine, except that it then suggests that a being is beneficial as long as it's not dark, which is not the case.

It's interesting to note that some scholars assert that other, seemingly unconnected religions (e.g. Tibetan) also recognize these same beings (using their own terminology).

I unfortunately don't have a reference, but I have it on good authority that you can find Jesuit writings where they openly talk about reincarnation, contrary to the outer-religion teachings. They also tought their missionaries the use of pendulums and dowsing to find drinkable water, food, medicinal herbs, etc. when they're alone in a strange land. There are books by at least one French Jesuit priest where he shares the techniques. The more you dig, the larger the discrepancy between the out-group and the in-group teachings. I love this stuff.

I over-shared I guess, but it was fun writing this.

Would guess Netherlands based on their posting history. The Netherlands are roughly 38% Christian, compared to roughly 74% of the US.

Or maybe that’s just a piece of information they think is perceived poorly and want to discredit without addressing arguments.

The system you’re describing is one where lives are enriched by this drive away from zero sum, but in my view the one we observe is increasingly described by excess and inefficiency. The middle class is shrinking in the face of technological advances. More people say they no longer expect to do better than their parents. Either the last 40 years have seen no tech progress, or he’s just wrong. It’s worse than zero sum on average, it’s declining economic conditions. It’s full time jobs that used to pay a living wage, but don’t anymore. Even over years of productivity gains (ie away from zero sum, the conditions Thiel says keeps us from violence), a great percentage of the population is losing ground.

Even in your own examples of zero sum, the reality is they are excess-driven. People go to Harvard often by competing for excess which enables contributions above and beyond what is required to pay for education — excess, not academic meritocracy. Many people go to the Olympics because of sufficient excess to spend years practicing bobsledding, not because they’re necessarily the best athletes in the country. We have an abundance of highly paid professionals working jobs they would self describe as “bullshit jobs” (excess).

I’m even saying that I have excess in my own opinion, even though I’m maybe a top 10% earner. And while people are hungry, uneducated and homeless, we have the means to resolve this with existing technology, but we don’t have an economic framework to do it.

In my opinion, the AI race could lift up everyone, or it could create greater excess and inefficiency. I’m pessimistic that recent history is showing it’s the latter.

My original point was just that even in the top 10% of earners (and probably more), violence is a preposterous idea. Seeing my peers excelling whether financially or otherwise is not going to turn me violent. It doesn’t threaten my basic needs or impact my greatest desires, which are to have the freedom to pursue things that I think are important. In my view, the fabric of society is strong when people’s basic needs are not in jeopardy, not resulting from insufficient excess.