About the Trinity

Disgusted with your own inability, unwillingness, or cognitive dissonance. Suit yourself there then with me, but I Am, that I Am.

Nah, I'll trust the Bible over you. You can go now.

Not bad, user. Not that it'll please the brainlets.

Absolutely wrong

God is only One. But God knows Himself since eternity. When you know a thing, you have a image of the thing in your mind. God generates (not "creates")a Perfect Image of God: The Son of God, God since eternity. The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, being also God since eternity. 3 Holy Persons, One Holy God.

Also the Triune aspect of God can be concluded without difficulty from His creation: the triangle is the fundamental geometrical form. The material world is "written" in a code with 3 as base. Space has 3 dimensions, matter has 3 states, time has 3 tenses. God Is Triune

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Here's a couple of useful things on the trinity I've saved from anons in other threads over the years, I don't know how useful/crazy/heretical they are:

The act of speaking requires that the speech is first willed internally, the speech given the form of a word externally, and the speech given breath in order to produce a sound in the first place.

When God speaks the world into existence,
The Father wills it.
The Son is The Word. (John 1:1)
The Holy Spirit is the breath. (Look up the roots of the word "spirit" in Latin and Greek) [and Hebrew, I would like to add]

—

1) There's God, and God creates through the Word (which is also the Verb). The Word must be uncreated then, because God creating the Word through the Word doesn’t makes sense. Therefore, the Word of God is always with God. Through his Word, God knows Himself. In other words, God have a image of God in His mind. Since God is infinite, His image is infinite. God loves Himself with infinite love, and always had. Thats the Holy Spirit. Infinity knowing Infinity and loving Infinity. Eternal knowing the Eternal and loving this Eternal. And yet, there cant be "three infinites" or "three eternals". There can be only one. Therefore, God is One and Trine.

2) Existence can't be existence if theres only "one thing". The number "1" wouldn’t be a number if there were no number "2". Therefore, infinity (all the numbers) always existed. Theres the "1", and theres the "2". The "3" proceeds naturally, since it's "1+2". 1, 2 and 3 are different things, right? Therefore, they are all "1" as well: [1=1], [2=1+1], [3=1+1+1]. The minimum amount of "numbers" that can make something concrete is "3". The triangle is the fundamental form. Therefore, God is One and Trine.

For God, who is infinitely perfect being, existence of others beings than Himself is not necessary, but simultaneously He possess Love in infinitely perfect degree and, if so, this Love cannot be egoism.
Conclusion of this is that God exist in at least Two Persons.
Each of those Persons is able to do infinitely perfect giving of Love to other Person with fullness of Itself, and other person is fully able to receive this giving.
Because in result of full giving no Person cease to exists (because it would deny Love of giving-Person towards reviving-Person), it is necessary that Third Person exists, that is (because of nature of this act) subject of mutual giving of Two Other Persons.
Existence of more Persons is not necessary, and because God is infinitely perfect, there is nothing unnecessary in him.

Moreover each of persons is eternal due the very nature of God. The First Person is principle of Second One, whom He generates. Therefore First Person is Father to Second One, who is His only-begotten Son. Moreover, Third Person proceeds from the Father as the first principle and, by the eternal gift of this to the Son, from the communion of both the Father and the Son. Therefore from a Single Principle through a Single Spiration Third Person is both Spirit of Father and Spirit of Son. His name is Holy Spirit.

>solid, liquid, gas what about plasma

And Bose-Einstein condensates?
Most triples in nature do not provide good examples of how the Trinity works, and should be avoided.

Guess you're the user who wrote the bit I just saved and reposted

Yeah fair, there was also the sun's heat and light analogy I was going over in one of the old threads but they all seem to reach their breaking point as coherent illustrations fairly early on

im also relatively new to christianity and also have trouble understanding the trinity. Why does jesus cry out to God when hes being crucified if he is God?

He's speaking to God the Father, a separate person.

Yes, but I thought according to the trinity jesus is God the father made flesh?

He is not the farther made flesh, no, as says the father is a separate person. He is the Son made flesh, or the Word made flesh.

Also I'm chiming in here to explain that the cry Jesus made was the first line of a Psalm (praise song/poetry from King David's time in the old testament), which Jesus referenced (in part) in order to draw attention to the people around how he was fulfilling the prophecy of the Psalm, which spoke of his heart being like wax (an anatomically accurate description of the state his heart would have been in following the stress and suffering his body had been and was going through), his feet and hands being peirced, casting a lot for his clothes, etc)

biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm 22&version=ESV

Trinity is the exact reason why I left Christianity. The more I tried to understand it , the more I got convinced it doesn't exist and here I'm a non religious man . I think Christians are stuck in justifying an imaginative thing that's not real and it looks they can't until now . They keep giving examples like sun and heat and things like that and at the end you are just like what the hell is that ?!
If you're interested , here are some verses from Islamic scripture describing Jesus , I think they're like what you said tho I don't like Islam and disagree with them somehow but you may get interested carm.org/what-does-islam-and-quran-say-about-jesus

I don't understand the trinity well myself (no one does fully but am sure some do more than others) but I do give weight to the argument that due to it being of God, the inifinite, our finite minds by their nature cannot comprehend the fullness of God and his nature - so phrased in a more silly way - in a sense, it makes sense that it [the trinity] doesn't make sense.

I would like to be able to be more learned on it though because it's always the thing Muslim's get hung up on in debates and if you're not well versed and careful they can make it seem like it's a contradiction (which it's not, it's simply a mystery).

Let me ask you something: if you were a parent (or if you are) and you love your child, how far would you go to save your child? What humiliation and pain would you be willing to take onto yourself to save it? If God is full of love for humanity, why would it be beneath Him to become human, live among humans and die for our salvation? Do you think of God as some petty skyking? Just because God became human it does not mean that he stopped being God.

Embed related is unironically the most helpful video about the trinity for lay people that I've seen.

If you want an analogy that does work,
historyofphilosophy.net/augustine-brittain
is a pretty good overview of Augustine's "On The Trinity" that explains the human mind analogy.

He was actually quoting scripture

Stfu and leave our board. Islam is retarded.

Literally said he was older than abraham called himself Yahweh (I am). That's why they tried to stone him

OP here.

Because God is omnipotent, if he wills humanity to be saved, he could just say: "be saved" and it would be as he commanded.

This does not make sense to me.
How can an infinity being assume the position of a finite being?

This was p. good. But if it cannot be comprehended by human reason (the trinity), wouldn't it be fine if I simply worship the Godhead, as Jesus did?
I'd rather worship something I truly believe in (God), instead of something I am told to believe in(the trinity), as I believe this would weaken my faith.

He could have done that, but He always respects our free will. He has shown us the way to salvation through His own life, death and resurrection, but it is up to us whether we follow Him.

Gee, it's like God is omnipotent or something.

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The condisants are close to unity. I believe in ethereal space, but string theory can be further expanded to include a case for a zero-dimensional point based universe which can contain infinite dimensions.

nabbed from the screengrab thread

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Many Bible scholars admit that the Trinity is not taught in the Bible, only imagined into it. Why was this done?

>Hatred against the (((chosen)))

1)A lot of Church Fathers after the 1st Century were former Neo-Platonist, Platonist, Pythagorians and educated in Alexandrian Philosophy. A lot of them claim to reject Greek Philosophy but did use it as a tool to explain and interpret the Bible. As a result, Origin and Tertullian paved the way for later writers to start introducing Greek Philosophy into Christianity and pave the way for the Trinity and Modalism.

2)During the 1st Century, Christianity was still a Jewish sectarian religion. Almost all the Christians were Jews, went to the Synagogues still, and used the OT to prove Jesus was the Messiah. During the 1st Century, Christians had a hard time converting Gentiles because they didn't want to worship a Jewish monotheistic God. They didn't want to put faith in a Jewish man, Jesus, because Gentiles were highly anti-semitic because of how Jews mistreated foreigners and constantly showed public disdain to them.

Because of this attitude the Nicene Fathers like Athanasius wanted to "update" Christianity and divorce it from anything Jewish related. This included removing Jewish culture and Jewish thought from even the OT. This was also done to make it possible to explain the Trinity without Jewish contradiction anymore. This was also done to erase Jesus the Semite and replace him with God the Son. Jewish culture, Jewish history, and Jewish doctrine contradicted that heavily. Removing Jewish influence and replacing it with Helenist Philosophy, Neo-Platonism, Stoicism, Sol Invictus, and Mithraism made Christianity now very attractive to gentiles. Those philosophies is where the Trinity rose from.

3)Pseudo-Intellectualism: The Bible prophecied this

At the time Christianity was considered a religion for uneducated, lower-class, working class and narrow-minded people. As you can see from the Bible verses up above it was prophecied that Christianity would be looked down upon as a religion for the foolish, uneducated, and lower-class. Going back full circle to the point 1) the Church Fathers. Celsus wrote that to Origen up above and Origen quoted him saying those things about Christians. So to fight back and prove that Christianity was "smart," "hip" and "educated" the church fathers went back to their former Alexandrian and Greek Education to prove that Christianity was deep, thoughtful, and intellectual. A lot of that education from Plato and Pythagoras was already used by other pagan religions to explain their trinities and Triads at the time. That is why Tertullian explained God, Jesus, and the HS as a "Trinity." It wasn't the same Trinity you know of as today but the fact that he used it shows he went back to his former education. The definitions of the Trinity itself: Essence, substance, nature, homoousios, persons, hypostatic union are from Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras. They all taught these centuries before Jesus was born. Just trace "hypostatic union" on Wikipedia. It goes straight back to Plato, Aristotle and Neoplatonism. All of those ideas and terminologies were adopted by the Church Fathers to pave the way for the Trinity and Modalism. This was done to make Christianity SEEM intellectual and acceptable to the upper class and educated pagans of the time.

why you don't like Islam?

The reason why God cannot come as a man nor sacrifice himself as a man is because God's strictness of his justice demanded equal payment for an equal debt. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life, a perfect man for a perfect man.(Deut. 19:18-21; Leviticus 24:20; Exodus 21:23-25; Ex 21:26-27; Ex 21:28-32)

It was Adam that committed the crime of sin. Therefore another man like Adam must pay for that crime. This is what the Ransom is about. It was so mankind didn't have to die in Adam's place but so as Jesus could cover Adam's sin perfectly.

All Sacrifices are paid to God. God is the one holding mankind ransom in exchange for the debt left behind by Adam

That's why animal sacrifices were performed to forgive sins. However…

Animals are inferior to men so they cannot cover the wages of sin that was caused by a perfect man. So why not kill an average human for all mankind?

Imperfect humans cannot cover the redemption price that a perfect human left behind. So..

(Hebrews 6:13-18) For when God made his promise to Abraham, since he could not swear by anyone greater, he swore by himself, 14 …15 …. 16 For men swear by the one greater, and their oath is the end of every dispute, as it is a legal guarantee to them. 17 …

God can’t be sacrificed in Adam’s place because he is superior to Adam. God swore on himself because there is nothing greater to swear by. That means he considered himself superior to everything and everyone.

Corresponding to whom?

Jesus corresponds to Adam perfectly. That's why Jesus can't be God nor deity because that would make him superior to Adam. When Jesus was on Earth he was a perfect man: nothing more, nothing less. God cannot sacrifice himself because he's to superior to Adam and that would be an imbalance to his sense of justice: an eye for an ear, a tooth for a foot, a mouth for a hand.

Since a perfect man sin a perfect man had to cover his place perfectly. That ransom would then be paid to the one demanding it: God.

I used to be a nice and generous person. All I wanted to do was have sex with animals but the zoophile and normal people here on the east coast started using their privilege and entitlements to abuse me.  "They have this, they have that, that's what makes them special and they can say and do whatever they want to me because they own something." The moment you give these supremacist people ownership or authority over anything they will use it to harm people.That's what they do, even the board owner does it. They are abusive, two faced, manipulative domestically violent monsters. The moment they think they have something you want, they will use it to hold you hostage and ruin your life. They make me sick.

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What? She Jacob wrestled with the mental of God? And was surprised that he saw God mental face to face and was spared?

God's was with God and it is God? And the law took on flesh? Are you not seeing the mental gymnastics here?

They are violating people by not letting people have sex with horses, while asking for money to watch some jackass talk about all the bad things we are and are doing. You're abusing people. That's a crime against humanity.

Thanks for taking the time to write all this, makes a lot of sense.

No, I meant it was happening inside of him. He himself wrestled with the law of God, and the Law overtook him, and he was named Israel.

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
I simply see this as an explanation of how the inner working of God were with God from the beginning.

No

"and the was made flesh and dwelt among us"
The inner workings of God can become a man, but it's outside God's power, or somehow beneath him but not his inner workings? What would if mean for one's inner workings to take on flesh?

It mean that a man completely obeys God's Law and Teachings.

written ~100AD.

Yes we must remember that these are all just imperfect analogies

The trinity can be a confusing concept and it's one of the ones where there's actually some utility in looking outside Christianity into other spiritual philosophic texts to see why the trinity concept shows up in multiple places…

Hindus have a trinitarian godhead (see: Bhagavad Gita) as do the Jewish Kabbalists (see: The Zohar) and a lot of gnostic writings and Hermetic systems really spend time unpacking the trinity idea.

It's something like this…

God Most High, the unchangeable pre-existent pre-eminent One, must contain the Knower, the Known and the Knowledge itself.

The Kabbalists describe this as The Crown (Keter) which is God the Father, then Wisdom (Chokmah) which is The Son, then Understanding (Binah) which is the Holy Spirit.

You could think of these roughly as being The Sum Total (God as One not doing anything), his Active principle (Him doing stuff) and his Passive principle (the part on which He acts).

This is *very* knotty stuff to get around and frankly most Christians don't understand it even a little bit because it's very high conceptual philosophy… so the short version is don't worry about it too much.

Here's what you need to know…

God the Father is the pre-existent creator of All things… the self-aware, self-generating, All-knowing, etc. etc.

God the Son as the manifest Christ on Earth is a fun one that requires some explanation.

It would take pages to explain why there must necessarily be Darkness along with Light and Evil along with Goodness… but the short version version is that it's logically impossible to create a dynamic universe without it because without diminishing God's Light there could be no separation from his Unity.

This continues further into the conceptual space of choice… there is NO FREE WILL without the capacity for Evil… it is genuinely as simple as that. If we couldn't choose to be shitcunts then we don't have Free Will and that's that.

OK so Evil exists… how then does God justify his creation to his creatures?

There's an idea in medical science that you can't just test wild unapproved medicines on people but you can self-inject. i.e. it's alright to do it to yourself… that's ethically sound.

So God justifies his creation by manifesting himself in the form of his Son… who necessarily must be perfect in his humanity as well as perfect in his divinity, because otherwise it's a shit example.

What I mean by that is that Jesus/Jesus was completely human… if he wasn't then he would be too far abstracted from us to be a perfect example or sacrifice.

God manifests as the embodiment of his own Wisdom and imparts said Wisdom to his creatures. He also gives us the example of self-sacrifice for the good of the creation.

Basically, we're justified through Christ's sacrifice because he came down and suffered as extremely as possible and very visibly. This is by design because if he'd "gotten off lightly" then those who suffered more would not be justified in their suffering.

You have to consider too that this example needed to be something that could be understood by ALL people regardless of their culture or intelligence… that's why it needed to be acted out. Actions speak louder than Words… and even though Christ/Jesus is the Word… it's his Actions that were our salvation.

So when unpacking this stuff there's a lot of really complicated reasons for it all happening, which would necessarily follow from the fact that God has perfect supreme intelligence… but there needs to be an "interpretation for everybody" so it was done in such a way that even the dumb-dumbs would be able to understand it.

There's a stack more to it than this but it's like… several books worth of stuff.

TL;DR - God manifested Himself as his Son… who had Free Will and could choose temptation… who struggled against the flesh in the same way we did… who went through all the same shit we did… he was completely human and not abstracted from us… he did this to demonstrate his Wisdom and justify the Evil and suffering in this world through basically always doing the right thing. He suffered in the extreme to prove that God is not indifferent to the extremes of suffering that this world is capable of producing.

God is with us. He is with you now. He sees through your eyes and he shares in your trials and tribulations.

^^

This guy gets it.

Gotta be so careful with how you phrase this to people though because you get accused of being a Deist or a Gnostic or a Pantheist by dummies…

You are exactly right though.

Matter has more than 3 states. There are, however, 3 energetic worlds in which the 4 fundamental particles operate and we know that in the lowest that said matter has 4 states (plasma as someone pointed out)

The Son is not simply a mirror of the Self-Knowledge of God as you suggest, that's genuinely preposterous because otherwise Christ can't be perfectly human.

Further your Holy Spirit just kinda shows up without explanation or definition.

I notice a LOT of Christians are very fuzzy when it comes to defining the Holy Spirit and how it's part of the pre-existent triune godhead.

I mean you're basically just saying "The Son proceeds from the Father and the Holy Spirit proceeds from that and that's all God from Eternity. The End."

Can you not see how that literally explains nothing… you're just describing what you believe is without any why.

I'm the opposite. Only baptized this year after some 20 years as a non-believing horseman style athiest/agnostic.

The Trinitarian Godhead is true it's just a really difficult concept which is why, in some respects, it's better to ignore it. It's not actually instantiated in the scripture anyway (old Greek NTs do not mention trinity AT ALL)… it's just implied through inference.

Islam is crazy wrong about Christianity and the Koran is so ridiculously inconsistent with what it says about Jesus I wouldn't put any stock in that interpretation at all.

One simple example is Pharaoh calling for Moses' crucifixion… just a casual several thousand years before crucifixion was invented.

If you acknowledge the existence of Jesus then you have to declare him a madman or a liar for going around saying the things he's purported to have said… that's if you don't believe them.

Jesus demoted to the status of prophet genuinely makes no sense… and if God doesn't change and his Law is pre-existent then why is Islam COMPLETELY at odds with Jewish and Christian ethics.

It is so contradictory it would make your headspin but you actually have to read it and see everything in context to see what a complete mess it is.

Interesttng posts

Well then call me a dummy but I'd love to hear more on this (i.e. how it's not any of those things), because 's
specifically sounds very much like the Hindu's conception of reality (hence ) of Brahman dreaming or putting on a play or drama or game of hide and seek with itself for..well I'm not sure of the reason, honestly..fun? It's own pleasure? (Thought it was a non-personal being/force so not sure how it could experience fun or pleasure..)

Muslim.