After years of listening to the wonderful Rabbi Tovia Singer and Michael Skobac I began to see the fallacies in Pauline Christian theology, then considering myself a Noahide.
But after a year or so of studying the Tenakh through a Jewish prism and contemplating Isaiah 45:7 which shows that Hashem is the true author of evil in the world, not Satan, I have arrived at the conclusion I could not worship a deity that instigates evil.
Pauline Christianity neatly avoids this distasteful scenario by blaming all evil on the Devil but Judaism has no such escape.
Isaiah 45:7 KJV: "I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil; I the LORD do all these things."
This would have been the perfect place to state that Satan creates evil or human wickedness creates evil, but nope the creator god takes full credit!
This has motivated me to study Gnostic Christianity which thousands of years ago understood that the creator god was half good/half evil (demiurge in Greek meaning the "half" creator) caring nothing for human suffering while the true God Monad (Greek for One True God above all) was 100% benevolent and was the only deity interested in mankind's salvation, sending Jesus to deliver teachings of how to escape this evil and degraded physical condition in the Gospel of Thomas, one of 45 Roman Catholic banned Gnostic scriptures discovered in the Nag Hammadi collection unearthed in Egypt in 1945.
This Gnostic Jesus did not die for anyone's sins, suffered no pain on the cross, neither was he the Jewish Mosiach but came to deliver secret teachings that revealed the true path to salvation and a return to living not "with" God but actually becoming a God.
The idea here is that human caused sin is only a tiny portion of mankind's fallen condition, the primary cause is that of the creator god (demiurge) constructing a defective and inherently evil, disease and disaster ridden planet where it was impossible to attain any kind of stability or lasting happiness.
The purpose of the demiurge then is to entrap and subjugate humans to keep them in a low concious state with as much suffering as possible to prevent them from ever discovering their true potential and escaping the trap of a physical earthly prison.
When physical death occurs, one is reincarnated back into the degraded physical form again, again and again to continue their incarceration forever.
We can deduce characteristics of the creator god simply by observing the traits of the physical universe that was constructed, a universe that operates strictly on a force against force basis, with no concern for anyone's sustenance, safety or dignity.
We may observe the evil purpose of the creator early in Genesis when he set up Adam and Eve to fail telling them not to eat from the tree of good and evil, which would make them gods according to the devious talking serpent.
Of course they were going to fail, having no previous experience with the consequences of disobedience to the creator, and were then punished with DEATH for EATING AN APPLE as their first and only offense!
And if that wasn't bad enough all their progeny to this day were punished with death for a sin they had nothing to do with!
Does this sound like a benevolent, loving, and merciful deity to anyone?
Were Adam and Eve ever told not to trust talking serpents?
It was all a setup!
According to modern game theory, Adam and Eve were forced to play a game while having no input or agreement on the rules, and which unknown to them was completely rigged against them, not understanding that devious talking serpents would be used to try and leverage their natural desire to become gods in order to get them to break the law. Where is the fairness in this game?
It should be obvious that the entire purpose of the Garden was never to provide a perfect environment for Adam and Eve to exist as gods and live side by side with the creator, but rather to get them to fail in their quest and kick them out!
Now we have the complete explanation for human suffering - the creator set up this evil physical prison from the beginning to prevent humans from realizing their true potential as a God of the same capability and stature as the creator!
We see that the creator god actually recognized Adam and Eve's true status as eternal god like beings by placing them in the garden in an idyllic immortal state but then relied on their lack of experience with subterfuge to trick them out of their true heritage.
We may be forgiven for asking why the creator god would do such a thing but the following could possibly shed some additional light on the matter:
Ex 34:14 KJV: "For thou shall worship no other god, for the LORD whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God."
Would a jealous creator then be willing to share his power with a couple of green behind the ears upstarts?
Obviously here no potential competition can be tolerated!
This may all sound preposterous and heretical which explains why the apostle Paul spent considerable effort to stamp out Gnostic ideas but maybe not so crazy in that there are two Gods, one evil and one good, with the evil creator god (demiurge) employing every trick to prevent humans discovering their actual origins as a divine spark of the One True God Monad and completely explains the existence of human suffering.
Can your religion do that?
As an interesting footnote, the Gospel of Thomas is a recording of Jesus' secret teachings, written down by Jesus' own brother Didymus Judas Thomas, the Doubting Thomas (at least he claimed he was contrasted to the Synoptic gospels whose authorship is not claimed or known) and considered by many biblical scholars to be the earliest Gospel and therefore most likely to be authentic as written. Of course the Roman Catholics did not include this gospel as canon in the NT because it did not describe a salvation plan similar to the decades delayed Synoptic gospels and Pauline epistles.
So instead of becoming the most important gospel of the NT it was ordered banned and burned along with the rest of the Gnostic scriptures.
Another interesting conjecture is that since Gnostic Christianity was the dominant form of Christianity before the heretical Pauline version backed by Roman authority stamped out all other forms, replacing Gnostic viewpoints with his own, Gnostic ideas might still be dominant today had Paul not taken that trip to Damascus!
If one would wish to explore the concept further, could one postulate that the evil demiurge was the actual source of Paul's supernatural visions, then resulting in the intentional obliteration of the true teachings of Jesus by means of Roman decree and replace them with the false salvation of Pauline Christianity? Why not?
We may consider that Gnostic ideas of dualism with good and evil deities are a backward relic of ancient paganism, but when we examine why such ideas are scorned we come immediately to the multiple and possibly even overbearing statements of the creator deity insisting repeatedly that he is THE ONLY ONE. (30 or more by my informal count). Would a jealous demiurge have any reason to make false statements here?
Again, these ideas are thousands of years old, not originated by me, and require a radical rethink of one's religious datum points but offer a surprisingly comprehensive explanation of the universe around us, not as we would necessarily prefer it to be, but as IT ACTUALLY IS.
There is no attempt to invalidate anyone's religious beliefs here, only an attempt to portray another completely logical and consistent viewpoint that accurately reflects reality.
A thought provoking 90 minute video on the lost gospels of the Gnostics filmed in Egypt by the BBC: