polytheism in denial
That's more like the saints
intercessory prayer takes it to the next level but if you're praying to god and jesus you're either not doing monotheism or you have to do the gymnastics about god impregnating his mother to give birth to himself and people tend not to like having that pointed out.
Sincere answer:
Jesus was likely an apocalyptic preacher who was crucified by the Romans but developed a following in the course of his ministry. Shortly after his death (and maybe just before), his followers saw him as a man who had the “divine” about him, like a messenger from God. Eventually, his followers started treating him like he was still a man but who was adopted by God as his son. Then eventually (maybe early 2nd century?) you eventually had this notion of Jesus as actually God. They started with a man and kept heaping glory on him until they made him God.
So over the decades, you have all these contradictory texts about Jesus’ divine versus human nature. When you get to the 3rd and 4th centuries, eventually church leaders wanted to create one harmonized view of who Jesus was. But the the problem is your sacred texts all describe him in contradictory and mutually exclusive terms.
So that did they do? They came up with the doctrine of the trinity to try and address all these contradictory views into one doctrine. But the trinity fundamentally does not make sense because it tries to take these contradictory views and mash them into a whole.
A good book if you want to know more is Bart Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God.
The alternate theory is Jesus never existed and Paul was the prophet who spread the religion. Paul is the one who thought Jesus existed in the spirit realm. The last supper appeared to him in a vision as did all the other acts, including his death. So in this version, which is gaining more traction, Jesus was always a part of God because he only dwelt in God's realm. The death, resurrection, all that was given to Paul in his visions and happened outside of heaven but in an spiritual arena.
Now the reason we think this may have been the case is because all of the most original writings in Acts and some of the other books and so on never mention any meeting of Jesus in the flesh or existing in the flesh but he does talk about visions of Jesus. All the writings we have from Paul of Jesus in the flesh are much later additions. Paul is the only author in the bible who could have written about Jesus in the first hand. All other books came much later.
There are a few flaws with this theory and mostly come down to how we think translations of some things should read. It is also important to know that this view is still a minority but the majority of biblical scholars are believers and therefore are quick to dismiss it.
GOOD post
Yes, i think it’s a solid theory that Jesus the real person believed the world was going to end within his own lifetime or thereabouts. It’s crazy to re-read the gospels with this in mind.
3 gods in a trenchcoat trying to sneak into an r rated movie
George Bush the Father, George Bush the son and George Bush the holy spririt
And Jeb!
Is the bush burning for Moses in Exodus or not?
Hosannah in the highest!
just god setting up free email accounts to keep using the same free worship trial over and over again
God creating sockpuppet accounts to argue with people on Reddit about corvids
An intentionally nonsensical concept to woo lay people.
"God is simultaneously 100% Jesus, 100% father, and 100% holy ghost (3 mutually exclusive entities), while also only being a single entity. Logically impossible you say? Exactly! My sky daddy is so powerful and beyond human comprehension he can do the logically impossible! Now give me a tithe."
Just the same body, mind, and spirit teachings common to a huge swathe of human religions, personified in the most patriarchal and annoying way possible
Isn't that every major monotheistic religion? Especially all the Abrahamic religions.
Is monotheism really a wonderful advance in the history of thought, a qualitative progress? There are plenty of cunning minds (but when you say cunning, you could as well say ill-intentioned or malign, inspired by the Devil) who draw a parallel between this unique God (who is represented in the popular imagination, if not in the purified vision of the learned, as an old man with a white beard, a symbol of wisdom and authority) and the patriarch of the patriarchal system, the autocrat of the power systems. In this imagery, which adequately reflects what is actually experienced, it is obvious that the wise old male is closer to God than a woman or a youth. This is a projection into heaven that legitimizes the patriarchal order and autocracy which prevails on earth. In addition, the elimination of female deities, always important in nonmonotheist religions, only accentuates patriarchal domination. Those cunning minds will add that this only and all powerful God deprives them, poor bastards, of all power.
- Samir Amin, Eurocentrism
The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. And for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour – for such a society, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, Deism, etc., is the most fitting form of religion
- Karl Marx
It is because they have their birth in the pagan religions of the time and vestiges of that paganism is littered throughout the bible. That is a reason there are a million names for the devil, they are generally just the other deities of the greater religious beliefs of the levant of the time. The other competing gods get "demonized" literally.
The lion the witch and the wardrobe?
the name of my sextape
There's a father and also his son and at some point some ghost appears. They are all divine but they are all the same person because otherwise it would be polytheism which is bad somehow.
The Father, The Son, and The Holy Ghost, my child. Now do 12 Hail Marys and come back next week.
Dream blunt rotation
The only thing I could think of that comes close to explaining the trinity without conceding that it's not supposed to make sense is if you imagine God to be like a three-headed hydra with each head corresponding to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
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It is monotheistic: In most religious traditions, if you have a god with multiple heads, you would just say that the god has multiple heads. You wouldn't say that multiple gods share the same body. Thus, this hydra conception preserves monotheism.
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It isn't God wearing three different masks: I forgot the name of the heresy, but the heretical belief is that the trinity is just God wearing three different masks like ancient Greek theater. The three-headed hydra isn't heretical in that sense because the three heads have distinct personalities. When Jesus laments of being forsaken by God the Father, it isn't God talking to himself, but a hydra head pleading to another hydra head.
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It presumes each part of the trinity is eternal: There's various related heresies that try to subordinate one part of the trinity to another, usually the Son being subordinated to the Father for obvious reasons. So one heresy is that Jesus started out as human but became God. Arianism also has this subordination as well. The three-headed hydra conception doesn't have a hierarchy. All hydra heads are equal with respect to one another.
Apparently, there is art that depicts the Trinity as a dude with three heads, but I guess this isn't popular because it's resembles Hindu religious iconography.
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iykyk
Is this a real question? Happy to give it a go but don't want to waste my time
I want to actually know. Evrrytime I think I understand it turns out to be a heresy
Evrrytime I think I understand it turns out to be a heresy
average peasant during the reformation actually reading the bible for the first time
Sure! So first, even though historically Christians would affirm the Nicaean Creed which espouses the trinity, not all Christians adhere to the trinity. Unitarians and Christadelphians, for example, along with a lot of Pentecostals. These are non-Nicenean Christians which may or may not be considered Christians depending on who you ask.
Some history. The Trinity developed alongside the canon, or which books did and did not make it into the New Testament. Philosophical discussions that leaned heavily on the Greek philosophy schools became either the foil or the leader in the arguments. So Gnosticism and similarly Docetism was rejected because Jesus was a real human which, in turn, led to the Gospel of Thomas being rejected. But Jesus was also considered divine, so the ongoing debates focused on how to reconcile God being human and also divine and also still God. This wasn't a quick process. It also caused huge divisions with the Eastern church rejecting the Filioque clause; the argument was/is largely over where the Holy Spirit comes from and its relationship to Jesus, but it's now just about tradition as its so deeply rooted at this point. So the trinity is not just answering "What is the nature of God" but also "How does that affect free will, faith, creation, etc." which means all explanations turn into a huge tome. As cultures change, explanations change and are accepted or rejected based on philosophic and scientific shifts. They all are attempting to explain how God can remain outside of time as "father" and inside of time as "spirit" and Jesus' relationship to both.
Even though some groups may act like nothing has changed since the fourth-century CE, there were many, many different phases in the development and understanding of the trinity. The famous allegories pop up early on and are sometimes praised at the time and later rejected (especially in the medieval period). This is very different from, say, Karl Barth. His dialectical understanding of the trinity in which we approach the I-Thou distinction by eliminating the differences God that acts in and through history for salvation ("economic trinity") and the eternal God outside of time ("immanent trinity"). Put another way, the relation between "God in Godself" and "eternal God and temporal acts." Barth is interested in how the eternal can enter time, how the divine can become flesh and still remain divine, etc., and that eventually makes him create such a picture of the trinity. This was a huge shift at the time. There will be more to come, for sure.
All that to say: don't worry about being confused about the trinity. Every generational of people have a go at it and try to understand it in their own culture, place, and time. As always, these things shift and change as material conditions shift and change. Find an explanation that has resonance with you, even if just for logical explanations. You may find "heretical" explanations are better than historical ones!
Two books that offer good introductory articles to guide you if you want to explore more: Cambridge Companion to the Trinity (2011) and Oxford Handbook of the Trinity (2012). If you only have 10 mins, read the preface/intro to each and find a chapter that sounds interesting.
In Christianity the role of Jesus is a self insert for all humanity, individually we are Jesus existing on earth trying to be good and trying to do good for the betterment of humanity but mostly to be embraced by the Holy Spirit on the day of our death. The self insert for Jesus makes sense now more than ever considering how dire earth’s conditions are due to the climate catastrophe and destruction of ecosystems, wars, genocides, basically the end of the world which is initially what Jesus is for- his existence was preparing the uninitiated into embracing the Holy Spirit due to an inevitable demise (end of Roman Empire - end of world) of our corporeal being. By embracing the spirit and laying down our beliefs in God, we find acceptance in heaven, or so the scriptures foretell. But the materialist analysis of all this is, the son being us, Jesus, all of humanity surrounding ourselves with the essence of a spirit, the spirit of earth, the life on earth, all the elements, the laws of the universe that maintains our ability to experience life. The father, the father being the ability for humans to experience life after youth, for humanity to evolve and to live a peaceful and tranquil life with the tools we have created to sustain life for many more years so that humanity can exist for many more thousands of years to reach that fatherhood status (adulthood) in terms of our time on earth. Considering humanity has only been on this planet a fraction of the time other species have yet we are facing impending doom and collapse is evident of this, we are still an infantile species, the dinos existed for millions of years
Genocide, destruction, evil
The rejection of the transitive property. It also makes me mad, but I can only say at this point that it just doesn't make sense.
We human beings do love making our little systems and categories don't we?
We started recognizing three vibes in our Big Tale and made a nice little system for them so that they could interact with each other
This overbearing absent father and a rebellious son who objects tradition and trancends into a female energy.
Idk seems like polytheism with extra steps. And looking at least at the catholic church in Poland, adding Mary and all saints the only word coming to mind is "idolatry" - or at least would be if not for entire thing being just a power grab mafia with a fairy tales for the naive and superstitious.
Or as certain XVI century bishop put it: "Let them believe even in the goat, provided they pay tithes."
This shit doesn't help. It doesn't explain shit
If you say they are forms, fragments, manifestations, or pieces of God you are doing heresy
incorrect
It's just this video guys https://youtu.be/KQLfgaUoQCw?feature=shared
Silly
