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this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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This is incorrect. In most Christian churches, Jesus is specifically not a demigod or a separate lesser entity from God. Jesus is God.
Holy trinity is literally one of the most central doctrines of Christianity.
Uneducated pagan mad this meme.
But if it's a Trinity, why are they listed separately if they're not separate? Why make the distinction if they're one and the same?
Who did God send down to die for our sins? Why does Jesus have a name if he just is god? Why not call him God?
If he is god, why is the resurrection so special? Wouldn't you expect God to be deathless anyway?
I'm half being difficult, half wondering what the real answers are.
that's their secret, shit doesn't have to make sense, and each branch can make up its own interpretation for the pesky details
Are Hannah Montanna and Miley Cyrus not the same person?
Are you the same person you were 15 years ago? Your name is the same. So is your social security number. But those were assigned to you by an external party.
You look different, feel different, act different. Are you the same person you were yesterday?
That's like the old ship problem. If I build a ship and then replace every part of it over time, is it still the same ship?
Ship of Theseus is the problem you’re thinking about
if I replace every part of the story is it still the same story though?
This is what I understood from the teachings of the Catholic Church:
There are sacred mysteries which are not explainable by rational or scientific reasoning and thus believing in these mysteries is the catholic faith.
So the Trinity means God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit are separate and the same.
Resurrection is special because God lived as a human, died to cleanse the sins of all humans (dying is a punishment for the sins) and his resurrection means he is really God, he cannot die and doing so he defeated death itself. Which means all humans believing in God will be able to cheat death and live eternally in paradise.
God died for our sins because he loves humans and wants them to be free of sin.
Trying to understand this through reason is not possible. You need faith, this is the whole shtick.
Again this is my understanding, been a long time since I went to catechism.
This is why I'm not religious. I believe God would have a more elegant solution.
Growing up attending various Protestant churches, the basics re the Trinity was that God is the Father/Creator of everything, the Holy Spirit is essentially His spiritual form, and Jesus was His earthly human form. YMMV by denomination.
So…you’re saying it’s ineffable?
Wasn't that a World of Warcraft expansion?
My mistake its catechesis not catechism. English is not my first language.
No, you had the right word.
I was just making a joke because it sounds like "Cataclysm".
More specifically, they are not one and same. Father is not Son is not Holy Spirit, but all of them are God.
Your questions are better answered by theologicians. I am not even a Christian, but even I know about concept of trinity. Perhaps everything about God is not meant to be comprehensible by humans. God is beyond humans after all.
For anyone wondering how this breaks down logically and where the error is:
The position as put here and elsewhere contains logical errors upon clarification. God has parts? Okay what makes the parts unique and discrete? If they aren’t, they aren’t parts of a whole and are equal to the whole.
For example: does the father have the same knowledge as the spirit? The same powers? If yes to these and similar questions, then they all are god and are not discrete. If no, then we don’t have one god at all, we have 3 gods. Also if no, the gods cannot be all knowing or all powerful individually.
I’ve never heard it put like this comment though. Instead I hear that they’re all god. As in, Jesus isn’t 1/3 of god, he is god. And so is the spirit/ghost and father. But if I ask if Jesus is the spirit, they’ll say no. This is an identity flaw. You’re saying that A=D and C=D but A!=C.
This is what you're describing and is a good pictograph for explaining why it's nonsense that cannot be presented in any accepted form of propositional logic.
OP commenter got mad at "pagans" for not describing something in terms of a contradictions, while accepting that contradiction on its own terms. Theist mad at accurate meme.
What's so hard about it. My house is a home, a storage and an awful dump at the same time. All those have different attributes but they are the same house all together.
These are interchangeable, the trinity is not. Your house is/can be a home, storage, dump, but a home can be storage and storage can be a dump.
The claims of the trinity are that the son, father, and ghost are all god. But the ghost is not the son is not the father.
It’s an identity contradiction. A,B, and C all equal D. But A is not B is not C. The claim IS NOT A + B + C = D which would actually make sense and works with your analogy. Like yes my house is a dump + storage + home. That works. Does not work with the trinity.
Its like voltron, 3 gods make 1 bigger god.
It's a secret identity. When trouble strikes, God ducks into a phone booth and becomes the Holy Spirit.
Calm down, silly. Did you forget that we're dealing with magic? Now that I've reminded you, everything should be fine.
Reminds me of this Simpsons clip:
https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=sVgVB3qsySQ
The best analogy I've heard so far is that god is like water and trinity is a bit like the aggregate states liquid, solid, gas. They are the same (water) but liquid water is obviously different from ice and steam.
And don't even get me started on all the theatrics in the Bible. I mean, why did God even bother to sneak temptation into the Garden of Eden for Adam and Eve? Why put all his shady stuff on Satan's to-do list? And let's not forget about flooding the entire planet! To me, the Bible seems more like another epic science fiction novel, complete with a variety of plot twists and mystery elements. Really, it's more 'Star Trek' than holy scripture in my eyes.
Why would I do that?
hmmm -- Sure smells like Polytheism to me.
One of my favorite early Christian sects is the Marcions -- They thought with how mean and angry OT God is and how nice and forgiving NT God is, and with God being eternal and all, that they must be DIFFERENT GODS with NT God now being in charge.
Of course, they were swiftly excommunicated for this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcionism
Sort of. Trinitarianism vs Unitarianism is a whole thing.
Then the Unitarians partnered with the Universalists, which was super weird.
UUs are lovely though.
You're still consuming flesh of divinity, which is a pretty grisly, chthonic look.
Personally I'm more interested in the mores and policies of a religion, which Christian ministries generally and the Roman Catholic Church specifically have shown they will discard readily to preserve their wealth and power.
Create a religion in which the members actually practice mercy, kindness and compassion and I will tolerate all their ritual depravities. (Sacrifices of the living in effigy, please.)
Well depending on the denomination, it is either seen as literally or figuratively his flesh and blood. Figurative makes a lot more sense: "...do this in the remembrance of me"
As much as I completely agree with your interpretation, Catholic ministers and politicians alike have gotten a bit weird about trans-substantiated wafers, asserting that it has become the real literal flesh of Jesus (though it's grossly offensive if we were to subject a trans-substantiated wafer to scientific tests to see if it's changed from the control).
It reminds me in the late 1980s. In response to the fatwa levied against Salman Rushdie over The Satanic Verses, there was movement to demonstrate Catholic resilience in the face of offense or mockery, and for a while the Catholic community expressed a casual stoicism we attribute to European Jews. It didn't last, and evaporated entirely after the 9/11 attacks.
Which is funny because the obvious answer is that it instantly transubstantiates back into a cracker if you don't have faith -- which is implied by attempting to test it in any way.
So the biscuit knows what you're feeling?
If faith is like the Force (the faith of a mustard seed should allow one to work miracles just as Jesus did) that would indicate no Catholic has ever gotten true sacrament, due to insufficient faith, since we've never had a living person capable of doing miracles. Throwing faith into the mix raises questions regarding everyone's communion and everyone's salvation. Much the way of the witch trials, only those who can do magic can get into Heaven.
If we adopt the modern interpretation of faith (that is, your willingness to give up the data of your senses in order to accept an authority-informed understanding of reality) it implies that people with depression are just doomed to Hellfire. All the latchkey kids who came from an abusive, neglectful household and have deeply ingrained neuro-pathways that fire off multiple times an hour I can never be good enough. will, according to the George Carlin Class Clown interpretation of Catholic dogma are just FUBAR.
Faith, and the inability to accurately measure it or create consistent standards tosses the whole of Christianity (except Universalist denominations) into the the pit of the problem of evil. People exist who are incapable of having faith enough to elevate themselves, which God allegedly created to burn, which makes Him malevolent, at least to those individuals He so created.
Sure. The cracker is the flesh and blood of an omnipotent god? An omnipotent god can certainly tell what somebody is feeling.
I don’t actually believe in any religion so I’m not overly bothered by the idea that only magicians can get into heaven. There are so many cults and competing (and arbitrary) rules about what it takes to be rewarded for obedience… It’s hardly worth marveling at any of the weirdnesses of a particular doctrine.
I wonder if that's how cannibalisms starts. You are worshipping god by eating him why not eat people in the same way
When it comes to predatory cannibalism, maybe. We've a genre of horror fiction about people who learned from desperation cannibalism (think: The Donner Party snowed in in the Sierra-Nevadas) who realize they get super-powers from eating human flesh. If those were true, we'd culture the bio chemistries that convey the powers and sell them as supplements.
However, the OG cannibals (cannibal is a Taino word, originally referring to a tribe in the Caribbean) had two practices of sacred cannibalism which resonate very close to Catholic sacrament. One is honoring recently deceased elders in their tribe by eating their brains, which was supposed to pass on their wisdom and help them remember the fallen. The other is specific to fighting and defeating a formidable enemy on the field, in which the victorious warrior would harvest and consume the heart of the fallen foe to gain their strength and courage.
I suspect the notions from sacrament and sacred cannibalism might have common origins, or at least come from similar intuitions regarding how spirit magic works.
I might be mistaken but I think most Catholics would concede that scientifically examining the objects wouldn't yield any results. What I've heard is that they understand that it's not transformed literally into his flesh and blood, but it is his flesh and blood in sort of the same sense as Jesus being both God and human.
As there's over a billion Catholics, it's really hard to get a bead on most Catholics as it's a really diverse group. Even among the clergy, the USCCB is a lot more conservative than even the Vatican and the CDF, and the LCWR is pretty left wing. A friend of mine is a Catholic history teacher, and as he puts it, has a small part of his brain for religious stuff that he gives a pass to, but doesn't question it too much. I've even encountered downright atheist / naturalist cultural Catholics, who practice the rites, go to confession, etc. because it's habit and something they do with family, much less informs their understanding of the natural world.
So yeah, to a lot of Catholics a wafer is just a wafer, except that it's appointed cultural significance within a social framework. While others will believe the wafer is materially Jesus flesh while still tasting like a wafer, and 1 + 1 + 1 = 3 = 1 and they embrace the cognitive dissonance. For some reason, it reminds me of Paradox of Gabriel's Horn, a shape with infinite surface area, but finite mass. So you could fill it with paint but couldn't paint it.
This just compressed a good several hundred years of religious schisms and theological debate that was sometimes very bloody in sorting itself out. There is also nothing to say if what became popular was actually the correct interpretation as what became "correct" was determined by political power as the religion consolidated often based more on merit of what city the bishop came from and the ecconomic flow of power. Had things gone just a little differently we would be talking about how Jesus is God's direct subordinate or how he is effectively a unique being who is one half human mixed with one half God because he was born of Mary making him half made up of her humanity which would make him a... Demigod.
Also most Christian churches believe a lot of stuff that was somebody's random fad at some point. Like Catholicism and the seven deadly sins. That was ONE guy who started something of a spiritual wellness cult, quit all the sins he made up and died because he ruined his body following his own made up doctrine. It would be like if you let a severe anorexic write the nutritional standards on packaging.
Naw bro the "pagan" in the room ain't the uneducated one. You're just carrying around a couple of millennia of political baggage and refuse to acknowledge how a bit of hubris in the generational game of telephone might have warped your sensibilities. Those first 300 years of power struggle could have hosted some very big misinterpretations since Jesus wasn't very focused on explaining his own lore so much as setting an example in how humanity should behave so flipping out about the trinity and deeming anybody a heretic seems to be kind of missing the point.
There is no correct interpretation with religion.
You wrote a long comment about the history of it which I am well aware of, but it doesn't change the fact that Holy Trinity is the core belief of all of Christian world today and it has been so for almost thousand years.
How can you "there is no correct interpretation" in one sentence and then the next go "but the popular one is the correct one" and not see the dissonance? Those dots are close enough together how can you not draw the line?
There is no dissonance because I didn't say that.
There is no correct interpretation in religion, but trinity is most accepted belief among christians.
It’s actually a fairly confused point theologically and Christians tend to draw these pictures in smeared pastels and charcoal sketches as opposed to pen and ink blueprints because it was and is still a developing idea. There’s a whole complicated history where the literary Jesus transformed from prophet to a divine being in his own right to being a literal aspect of god is complex. I consider Christianity to be semi-polytheistic for the same reason that Hinduism is polytheistic unless you consider each of the gods to be an aspect of a single god.
But it’s more meaningfully and directly polytheistic when you considerate the literary aspects of the bible where the vengeful and violent El amalgamated god is transformed into the lawgiver and transactional god and then into the loving caregiver described by Jesus, and they’re all invoked depending on which is best at the moment. Then you can throw in Jesus, and the Holy Spirit which is probably derived at least in part from Ashera (the mother of Yahweh), and you’ve got a pantheon.
Michael, Gabriel, Azrael, and the rest of the powerful angels would be considered demigods in any other religion, as would ideas like saints (including the Marian cults).