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Why is Christianity called a monotheistic religion, when in church every one chants they believe in the father, the son and the holy ghost?

creative51 8 Jan 6
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23 comments

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The argument over the characteristics of the Trinity is what has driven wars between factions within Christianity since its inception. Its a stupid debate and the source of much hardship worldwide. One more Christian mythology.

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Because they had to continually make up shit to make all their beliefs "fit".
What they have now is a big pile of illogical and contradictory hogwash.

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In Bill Maher's movie Religulous, I remember a scene where he's talking to a Jesus impersonator and Bill brings up the holy trinity. The Jesus impersonator likens the holy trinity to water. Water can be a liquid, solid, and gas. What makes up water (hydrogen and oxygen) doesn't change but the form (or state of matter) does.

I always thought that was a neat simile. Complete bullshit but neat.

The same "logic" that determines how many angles can dance on the head of a pin. 🙂

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The original super glue

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They call it the "Mystery of the Holy Trinity" as it's three gods in one. They consider it just one god in three forms you might say.

@creative51 Yeah they cover their butts by calling it a mystery. At least it's a bit honest. I think they should start referring to "The Mystery of Creation" and admit they can't explain that either. It would be seriously awesome if they'd STOP claiming they can explain everything about their god and just go with "The Mystery of Our Lord Jeebus."

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It's very simple, 3 in 1, you know, like the oil. ?

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Don't expect logic or reason, the whole point is to make it difficult, so that those in control of the religion have a baffle screen to hide behind when they want to, and so that they can claim to be special because they claim to understand it, which helps to keep the sheep in the pen.

Thank you, as good an explanation as I've ever read!!

It's baffling to me when people who seem to lack all critical thinking skills will tell others that god's ways are beyond human understanding...as if they know things beyond human understanding and then can tell everyone else that is why we humans don't understand it. It's not just an argument from ignorance, but a kind of argument from no-thinking-skills. It's like saying, "The answer is that we don't know the answer, and that's the answer to why we don't know the answer, because we can't answer what we can't answer, so that's the answer. Make sense?" No.

@greyeyed123 Great post, and yes. Make sense ? No.

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You are trying to apply logic and consistent terminology to mythological horseshit. That rarely ends well.

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Yep. that's more than one. But the fantasy doesn't end there either.

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Good question. Those are 3 gods, not one. Christianity is a tritheistic religion.

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The doctrine of the trinity is presented as a paradox. God is said to be three persons in one ("three! three! three persons in one!" ).

Jesus as the son of god was borrowed from other, older religions, like Mithraism, and from Hellenistic influences. The Old Testament's early books also speak of a "heavenly council" of which Jehovah was the leader, revealing the Jewish religion's evolution from polytheism to monotheism.

The early church fathers invented the trinity doctrine to hand-wave away these polytheistic influences and solidify Christianity's pretensions to monotheism. As an evangelical I simply thought of them as three aspects or expressions or personalities of a unified single god. God's justice and purity were expressed as the father, his comfort and support as the Holy Spirit, his mercy as Jesus.

@creative51 All theology only makes self-referential, self-ratifying sense. In the same way that an insane person only understands their own internal logic, based on whatever alternate reality they subscribe to.

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Great question!

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It's religion and you are looking for it to be logical in someway. LMAO. Just accept some people are just nuts and to expect them to do anything in an unnutty way, is nuts.

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2+2=5
1+1+1=1

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Yeah. One of the reasons that helped the rise of Islam after the cat church threw out a number of eastern xtion sects.
Great dialogue in Things Fall Apart when an African village elder compared Christianity with their religion and their little gods being like saints and angels.

Is it weird that when I read "cat church" I envisioned something quite odd?

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Perhaps because Monotheism was loosely adapted from a combination of the Ancient Egyptian system of Amun, Osiris and Horus ( the Trinity of Egyptian Elemental Beings, not Gods as deemed by the Catholic Church), i.e. Amun=the Father of Everything, Osiris= Son of Amun and Horus, the Guardian Spirit of Light, Knowledge and Harmony, mixed in with a very liberal dose of the Aten Ideology of Akhenaten which was, historically speaking, the birth of Monotheism.
Later, Titus Josephus Flavius adapted that idea when he wrote his treatise/history of the 3 Flavians to curry favor with his newly adopted, after being granted manumission from slavery to them, Roman family where he proclaimed them as being the Holy Trinity of the Roman Empire so that they could all be deified.
Xtianity is LONG on twisting things to suit its own purposes and needs but extreme bereft in the honesty and decency to admit that it has merely created itself from mountains of lies and plagiarisms.

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IMHO, but it seems to me that most of the mysteries are there to induce mental illness in their victims. To divorce them from reality so that they can be manipulated more easily. It might not have been intentional but it definitely seems to work as if it was.

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Christianity believes in other gods. It teaches you to only worship the one true God.
It says worship no other god before me
And
Don't worship false idols.
If all other gods were fake why bother saying the first of you could just say false idols.

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If you want to loosen your tight nuts, always use 3 in 1.

They use the simple logic that the three are all part of the same thing. What's so hard to understand about that?

The Big Guy in the Sky, the Dead Jew on a Stick, and the Featureless Ghosty Thingy. All one in the same.

@creative51 -- Prayer, I have found, does nothing for your nuts.

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Trinity explanation. Difficult concept but with some omnipotence makes sense.
The son is the power, he is the verb (YHWH power acts uding words and commands, he never do, he says and things happen) , he creates the world (genesis is YHWH giving orders to the world be created) and is the engine.
The father is the brain, he decides what will happen and make the plan he is the stiring wheel.
The pigeon is the fuel, its the ghost that fills the prophets with power and even Jesus only started for real after the holy ghost came upon him.
Basically they are 3 manifestations of the same being.
Ofc understand this description is not the same as believing in it.
Hinduism is kind of the same, many goods there are just aspects of another one.

Sure, but I think we have to warp the term "understanding" in order to make this work. You can play this game with any bit of metaphorical, poetic, imaginative concept you want. But it has no relationship with truth or reality. One is not three and three is not one. It SOUNDS interesting when we use paradoxical metaphors such as, "Then two became one" when describing love. But we are talking about two people becoming one couple bound by their love of each other. And as others have pointed out, humans are always going to see three as a magical number, since mother-father-child is the origin of all of us. The fact that religions steal natural, inborn relationships (father, mother, sister, brother, son, daughter) is no different than stealing the three and repurposing it.

@greyeyed123 You don't have to accept, I don't accept, I understand because I like to study cultures and religions, but ultimatelly it is just a complex fairy tale...

@Pedrohbds My critique was not on the claim of understanding. I understand how it is described as well. The problem is that it doesn't make sense. It doesn't scan to anything in reality. It's the same kind of "understanding" we have when a schizophrenic relative says we cannot watch tv because the aliens gave the FBI mind-ray photons to put in everyone's tv to steal their brainwaves and sell them to Disneyland. I can repeat this, and claim I understand why we can't watch tv, and repeat what the schizophrenic relative has said...but to call that "understanding" is (to my mind) to eviscerate language, truth, and reality while pretending we haven't. (BTW, the one piece of advice professionals give family members when dealing with someone with delusions/hallucinations is to NEVER agree with them that what they are seeing is real. That only makes it worse. I think using "understanding" in this way is only one step removed from explaining to others our understanding of why we can't watch tv.)

@John_Tyrrell Now I understand. Or is it "understand"?

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It depends on who you ask. The trinitarians will tell you "one essence in three persons", therefore monotheist. Some fundamentalists don't believe in the trinity, though.

Orbit Level 7 Jan 6, 2019
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They are the same, the trinity, As a kid at sunday school I always got a fit of the giggles when the minister started talking about the holy ghost.

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