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Is the doctrine of 'the Trinity' scriptually based?

What is it supposed to mean?

atheist 8 Mar 19
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OT: Yaweh appears to peeps.
NT: Yaweh no longer appears to peeps; Jesus does.
NT: Jesus dies and (eventually) no longer appears to peeps; the Holy Ghost does.

Gotta have a character around to to rep your mythos--or it's just a philosophy.

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Depends which version of the bible you read, it's an invention that was inserted at some point. Interestingly Isaac Newton had to pretend he believed in the Trinity because of his position, but, he thought it was BS.

if there two things I enjoy at my age now its sleep and eating out. the irony is its 3.52am here lol

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Fucked if Iknow or even want to lol

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Not sure.

But in the beginning was the Word.

And the Word was Bird.

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The Rule of Threes. I won't give it any more credence than that. The 'authors' were a fairly unimaginative lot.

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I was raised Mormon, so maybe my opinions are slightly tilted, but I don't think it is. If I remember correctly it talks about them being one in purpose, or working as a unit. But no actually saying they are literally one being. If it does, it seems particularly inconsistent when you look at all the times Jesus prays and talks to or about God as a separate entity. But the Bible is also largely open to interpretation so...

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The Bible never uses the word trinity but Christians pull from

Matthew 28:19 English Standard Version (ESV)

19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in[a] the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,

It wasn’t declared doctrine until the Fourth Council of the Lateran in1215.

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There is just one passage in Matthew 28.19 that seems to teach this but it's the general consensus of biblical scholars that it's a interpolation.

@Skyfacer You're probably thinking of Matthew 28:19
“Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit . . .”

That's not, as you point out, a very developed concept and can be taken several ways. There's nothing there that demands that the Son and the Holy Spirit be god or divine. There are around 20 other verses that mention the alleged "persons of the Trinity" in various ways and they aren't much of a scriptural basis for the modern fleshed-out concept of the Trinity, either. One gets the impression that over the centuries Christians asked WTF this all meant and the Trinity was made up to swat that particular fly, and then, it became central to orthodoxy in order to maintain Christianity's claim to monotheism.

An example is John 15:26
“When the Helper comes, whom I [Jesus] will send to you from the Father, that is the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, He will testify about Me . . .”

This mentions Jesus, the father and the spirit in the same breath but again does not define their exact roles, relationships, or nature. The son could ask the father to send the comforter and nothing about that cooperation makes them "three in one". Indeed in this verse if you read it and were completely ignorant of all the presuppositions of the Trinity doctrine, you might easily conclude that the "Spirit of truth" is quite separate from the father and the son.

A lot of modern Christian dogma is based on presuppositions that we are so used to hearing that we assume they're self-evident. For example, most of Paul's writings are interpreted based on the suppositions established by the gospels. Except that the gospels were written 35 to 70 years later. If you read the New Testament in the rough chronological order in which it was actually written / "published", and pretend the information in the later writings were not in existence (which, originally, they weren't) the inconsistencies are actually quite jarring. I'm of the view that the order in which the books were presented after the Council of Nicea was actually a way to subsume Paul's rather gnostic-leaning scribblings into a competing orthodoxy that claimed Jesus was a flesh and blood god-man, in contrast to Paul's "celestial" Jesus. Which is the main reason why I'm a mythicist, but that's a topic for another day.

The take-away I'm after here is, a lot of what Bibliolaters claim their holy book says is, as you suggest, heavily interpolated and hard to actually support even from scripture. So much for the supposedly objective truth from the infallible word of god.

@atheist Yes, especially Arianism. But when you think of it, all of these things are in part different ways to try to reconcile the "three persons" with the "one god" and trinitarianism is just the method of sorting it out that won over the others.

To me the core problem was that the independent agency of the different "persons" of the trinity was in fundamental conflict with monotheism. The way Islam and Judaism solved this problem was to not go to those places to begin with. It was just a terrible mistake to do so in my view.

On the other hand, one can argue that overall, the interlocking set of memes that constitutes Christianity was pretty successful -- in terms of market penetration if you will -- for a very long time. We're only now on the cusp of Islam overtaking Christianity as the majority world religion and Judaism, numerically speaking, has never been more than a minority influence, though its influence on religious thought is outsize.

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If its scriptural then it's definitely bogus. 😉

There are Christians who claim the Bible does not teach the Trinity. Those would be unitarians. There used to be a denomination named Unitarian, until it merged with the Universalists. Today the term "unitarian" does not describe a particular denomination, but past and current denominations that share the non-Trinitarian teachings. These are nominally Protestant but many Protestants reject them as heretical because aside from rejecting the Trinity (which is affirmed in all the accepted historic church creeds) they often reject the divinity of Christ.

They also tend to reject original sin, predestination, and the infallibility of the Bible.

I regard Trinitarianism as an awkward attempt to compensate for the logical conundrums introduced by calling Jesus the "son of god", a concept borrowed from other religions. It's hard to maintain a strict monotheism when you start talking about god having a son who yet was divine, and then toss in the Holy Spirit as well. So they came up with the paradoxical notion of god being three persons yet one god. The scriptural basis for that is ... debatable. But it is such a developed and entrenched meme that most of Christianity is heavily committed to, that it is accepted as true, similar to how, say, various Old Testament passages that weren't even intended to be prophetic, are cited to show that Jesus fulfilled prophecy.

By the way Islam is unitarian, as is Judaism. The Trinity is a uniquely Christian concept, at least in terms of any major and enduring religion. It's basically a theological hack.

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I have no idea whaat you are asking.

In the Uk, Canadian culture is not my strong point!!!

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