Ben Franklin's Proto-Mormonism:
I was thinking of writing this post only to see that I had already written it in 2009.
I find it fascinating how (in 1728) Franklin, were he serious, thought a cold deistic all powerful God created the universe but that the warm theistic deity he would worship was the God of our solar system, created by the ultimate unknowable God.
So maybe God the Father is actually a created being. That answers the "what caused Him?" question.
2 comments:
The belief in the lesser God created by the all-powerful God was originally an early Gnostic belief in the first and second centuries. It's what Dale Martin from Yale called "Proto-Gnosticism." I don't know how much access Franklin had to their writings, but the "tiered God system" within Christianity came from the Proto-Gnostics.
http://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/introduction-to-new-testament/content/transcripts/transcript08.html
Thanks for the link. Very interesting reading.
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