Heretical jibber jabber

This is an extremely rambling and badly edited text which attempts to combine three distinct strands of thought: Christianity, Gnosticism and the belief in a flat earth. Amazon has paired this little e-book with other flat earth books, but it's not clear whether David Allen really believes that we live on a flat disk in a finite universe, or if he has simply jumped on the bandwagon in order to promote his *real* message.

Allen is a Christian Gnostic, who regards the Nag Hammadi scriptures as more authoritative than the New Testament. “The Flat Earth Creator” even includes one of the Gnostic texts unearthed at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945, the so-called Apocryphon of John. Like the Gnostics, Allen believes that the God of the Old Testament is really an ignorant or evil demiurge, named Yaldabaoth. He is the jealous and violent creator of the material universe, in which human souls are trapped as in a prison. Jesus Christ is the true god. Jesus is the snake in Eden who tries to bestow Gnosis on Adam and Eve! Jesus had an esoteric message which he taught after the resurrection or through the Holy Ghost bestowed at Pentecost, a message of a radical rejection of Judaic tradition. Apart from the Nag Hammadi library, Allen also accepts two modern apocrypha (or hoaxes), Nikolas Notovitch's story of Jesus' journey to Kashmir, and the channeled “Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ” by Levi, in which the Savior visits both India and Egypt.

The author attacks the Jews and Zionism, while denying that he is anti-Semitic. He has some problems with Christian conspiracy theory, according to which Gnosticism is Satanic, and so are the Freemasons and other movements supposedly influenced by it. Allen's solution is to suggest that Masons and modern occultists worship Yahweh (i.e. Yaldabaoth) because they know that he is really the Devil, while trying to suppress knowledge of Jesus Christ (i.e. the Gnostic Jesus). Mainline Christians, by contrast, are presumably simply misled into worshipping Yaldabaoth, not consciously evil. Allen's own conspiracy thinking centers on a coming apocalypse, when Yaldabaoth's Satanic minions will occupy the Earth, claiming to be “aliens”, AI or transhumanists.

Allen staunchly denies that his ideas are “heretical jibber jabber”, but I think many people will see it that way. Personally, I was most taken aback by the latent anti-Semitism and (of course) the flat earthism, but I somehow got the impression that the author may be an “entryist” in this particular milieu, since he at one point suggests that both the round earth and the flat earth are “illusions” created by the demiurge…

Not a very good e-book, all things considered, and I therefore only give it two stars.