>>977926The history makes it complicated, but generally what people are talking about is a different, older version of Christianity.
They thought that the world was fake, and that it was being made by an evil god. The real god existed outside the universe, and it was a human's mission to reach enlightenment and transcend past the powers of the fake/evil god and reach the real/good god.
Jesus was integrated into this as the mediator between the good-god and humans. Some gnostics would have considered 'the evil god' to be the god of the bible....
It has roots in pre-christian Greek philosophy, and not all of them were really Christian. It also wasn't even an organized religion, 'gnostic' is more of a label which is applied to different people throughout history.
It's more accurate to call these people neoplatonic gnostic christians... there's other 'gnostic' people who don't fit this description at all.
The Matrix is 100% a dramatization of gnostic christianity. That's the easiest way to explain it... to gnostics, the evil god is The Matrix, and Jesus = Neo.
