Gnosticism - coming to God through knowledge of God obtained through knowledge of self.
"to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know God: this is the secret of gnosis.... Self-knowledge is knowledge of God; the self and the divine are identical"
Gnosticism does not portray man as a hopeless sinner, nor as a seperate creation of a distant God. It teaches that God is within us, and that our very nature is the nature of God hence 'we are made in gods image'.
It does not demand externalisation of god or belittling of man. Surely the search for self discovery is something we all undertake anyway, we all search for meaning and it is deep within that gnosticism says we will find a connection with God.
The Gnostic affirmation is that man, in some essential reality, is also God. This statement, of course, is one of duality: Man, though not God, is.
Much better than the 'unkowing' of faith based religions or the lack of inspiration of atheism. Is the search for the divine within, and when one finds the divine within one will see it without as well.
And it is not just christianity; the concepts behind some buddhist paths like zen, as well as sufism teach along a similar thread to gnosticism (though not by the same name).
Of course the main problem that much orthodox religion has with gnosticism is that not everyone can have the same level of god knowledge / god awareness, also being an internal search it is hard to measure or control, and one cannot simply prescribe a simple set of rules as a step by step guide on this inner journey. As such what doctrine does exist in gnosticism is often vague and changes from one to another. The problem many have with gnosis is that everyone must find it for themselves, one may not find their god within and then tell everyone else so they dont have to take the journey themselves.
If someone does come to know a god or an internal connection to divinity and would only persuade others to engage in this inner searching as well. Can anyone call that a bad thing?