Is it ok if I necro this when I have the time to give this the attention I would like? If not I understand. -that’s my bad for making arguments online that require more explanation than I can prioritize relative to my own professional research which comes first.huckelberry wrote: ↑Wed Sep 06, 2023 4:46 pmCanadiandude, I would expect that of those youth who accept upon instruction the idea of the Trinity all or nearly all accept it only due to social construction or tradition. To dig into the process that formed that tradition,the reasons behind the development of that social construction is not simple.
One might spend a lifetime aiming to understand the strengths and weakness of different claims. I think thought about such things is a good thing but I do not expect a church to undertake an extensive comparative religion study. Individuals need to shoulder responsibility themselves for most of that.
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addition, Ok Ill bite, what are you thinking of ? You said,
"I’m not convinced a person can claim real understanding of a thing if they cannot understand its incoherencies- and yes, of which the Trinity has plenty. Throwing these into some kinda ‘black box’ of a ‘mystery’ doesn’t cut it for me"
what sort of incoherence are you thinking of?
The first incoherency that immediately springs up is that it’s not apparent that the original authors of the respective texts that make up the New Testament actually had a homogeneous and consistent understanding of the relationship between “the Father” “the Son” “and the Holy Ghost”. Debates and decision-making by early church leaders on the matter seems to suggests that early church fathers had to pick, choose, sometimes write, rewrite, and reinterpret the text(s) to arrive at the decisions they did- but without any consistent way of ensuring the validity and reliability of this process nor resultant outcome(s) even to this very day.
If I’m remembering McClellan correctly, it’s not even clear that during its earliest days, that all or most early Christians even considered the personhood of Christ to be deific as opposed to being merely prophetic.
Sure, the development of the natural and social sciences can also be argued as having evolved socially, paradigmatically, but it would be a fallacy to argue that the resultant knowledge claims and processes by which the trinity- as opposed claims made within the sciences- evolved and are based upon are of an equally reliable and valid quality. (Sic, sorry having trouble phrasing my ideas here ^^). I can no more (not by much anyway) determine how and why the trinity is a valid, reliable, and necessary concept within Christianity today as per when these decisions started to be made in the first, second, and third centuries.
When I examine the development and treatment of Gnosticism, gnostics, and many other minority beliefs and minority’s throughout Christianity’s development , I’m more persuaded by McClellan’s argument that people often interpreted and wrote religious texts to confirm or even materialize their own societal interests, beliefs, and norms than attempting to arrive at any consistent and data-driven truth re: such matters.
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I am confused how God can simultaneously be father, son, and Holy Ghost while maintaining the same degree of distinctiveness and respective personhood that the Bible often suggests. When Jesus speaks to or refers to his father is he talking to himself? Referring to himself in third person ? How can he be at two material places at once? The Bible’s narrators talk about Jesus ascending/descending to/from the father or apparently referring to such.
If God the father is spirit- how did he ejaculate into Mary so as to impregnate her?(edit assuming that trinitarians are even certain of the existence of god, his incorporeality, and material as opposed to metaphorical paternity of Jesus) Did these gods exist prior to materiality? After? How is this substantiated? Trinitarians may claim such to be mysteries or have sometimes even attempted to explain such- but the former just puts things in a metaphorical ‘box’ so to speak, requiring blind faith, while the latter tends to to get even more incomprehensible.
(Edit: also, if divine paternity of Jesus is metaphorical, what makes Jesus so special?? He was a perfect example? That comes close to some claims made by Mormons and requires additional evidence as well)
Do the sciences put things in boxes such as mysteries? Certainly. But our boxes are a lot smaller and we try our best to hypothesize using what we can best already find as logical and evidentiary. We make use of as few of leaps and sky cranes as we can.
Yet the Trinity tries to solve dilemmas and create sacred mysteries for phenomena and claims for which the grounding evidence and logic is already extremely sparse if not baseless.
Logically there were Christians before the Trinity was as hegemonic of an idea within Christianity, and I haven’t seen much by way of evidence nor logic to legitimize it as a fact independent of the social agreement of such, it not anything that necessitate it as a/the major point by which distinguish Christians from non-Christians.
It’s arbitrary. Believe it should you wish but someone’s gotta point it out to both yourselves and Mormons that your arguments essentially amount to arguing about whose magical, unsubstantiated teapot is superior- without truthfully acknowledging the limitations of your respective claims.
I agree that Mormon theology is very different than the majority of contemporary Christians, and reflects many of the particular beliefs and perceived problems operative within the sociopolitical society it was formulated in.
Your point?
But no, I do not however see much evidence for considering Trinitarianism as any more, or less socially constructed and arbitrary than Mormons’ non-trinitarianism.
Edit: Whew! There’s so much more. This doesn’t even begin to approach the problem of how to define God and be certain of the concept validity of what it is we think we’re talking about when we say ‘God’.
But hey! That’s on ya’ll to establish- not on me. I sure ain’t gonna tire myself trying to disprove every conceivable fairy or gnome.
Best of luck to you
