Amergin
Well-Known Member
My weakness is that I am not familiar with the writings of Augustine, Athanasius, and Aquinas. I may be wrong to assume they supported the Trinity. I would ask these questions of the A-A-A scholars.
1. Did Jesus specifically and unequivocally claim to be God?
2. Did Jesus say he was sent by God to do God's work?
3. Did Jesus on the cross, say, "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
4. Did Jesus claim to not be as "good" as the Father/God?
5. Did Jesus claim not to know things that God knows?
6. How do you explain that Jesus and Mary have the same God?
7. Why did Jesus ask God to take this cup from me?
8. Why did a vast majority of Jews not accept Jesus as a god? They were the ones who were there in person.
9. What makes Christianity more credible than Islam? Votes do not count. There are about 1.4 billion Muslims and 2 billion Christians (of whom many millions in Europe and 30,000,000 unbelievers baptized Christian in America.) That makes Muslims and Christians about equal in number. Hindus are catching up with 3rd place.
And the Jews did not accept Jesus as a god. Some thought he might be a messiah but gave up on that when he died. I am using only the Gospels as my reference, not Stephen Hawking's and Leonard Mlodinow's "The Grand Design" on Quantum Theory. However, I doubt that Scriptural Scholars (heavyweight) have read Stephen Hawking, Brian Greene, Steven Weinberg, Niels Bohr, or Richard Feynman.
Jesus cults had some appeal due to the charitable nature. However, the converts were all Pagans (Greeks, Romans, Illyrians, Galatians, Capadocians, Lydians, Pergamumites, Cilicians (Paul), Bythinians, Armenians, Iberians, Celts, Teutons, Egyptians, Pontusites, Georgians, North Africans, and Thracians). They overwhelmed and drowned out the Jewish Monotheistics Jesus followers. However, the Christianised Pagans had little use for Jewish customs (like circumcision.)
Paul, a Cilician Jew from Tarsus, grew up in a port city in which Mithraism was strong. Paul who never met Jesus seems to have interwoven Jesus and Mithra consciously or subconsciously leading to classical Roman Mithaic ideas of "baptism, eucharistic meal, saving grace, "salvation," and the Nativity story of a "son of God" born in a cave (i.e. stable) to a virgin woman, to produce a son of God mixed with human. Interestingly "Jesus" in the gospel was visited by three Magi (Zoroastrian priests).
I disagree. I do not find Trinitarian ideas in the Old Testament. Paul had his conflict with the Jewish leaders, especially Peter and James over his attempted deification of Jesus. He was forced to flee to Nabataea for 14 years where his new religion was conceived. Paul in his epistles was the first one to deify Jesus in a limited way. He placed Jesus as a subordinate God to the High God JHWY (equivalent to Ahura Mazda). Some Jewish scholars speculate that Paul was sent by the Romans to disrupt the Jewish Jesus Cult and Judaism in general because of the increasing unrest in Israel.
In Paul's description of JHWY as God and Jesus as Lord, a vassal to a King or God. Paul was responsible as well at his allies who later wrote the gospels, for Arianism. Bishop Arius did not invent Arianism. Paul did. Arius was just a preacher of Paulism.
Paul invented a subordinate Jesus to the higher God, Arianism in all but name until Bishop Arius accepted it and preached it. Paulism is a better term. But Paulism/Arianism was the first form of Christianity although it was not called Christianity until the late 2nd or 3rd Century (when Paulism/Arianism dominated over Athanasianism and was supported by a couple of Emperors.) Paulism under the name Arianism was the form of Christianity accepted by the Teutonic Barbarian Kingdoms. Arianism came close to becoming the official Christianity. Before it, there were only various loose groups of Jesus (the human) followers.
The final triumph of Trinitarian Pagan Christianity was due to St. Helena, mother of Emperor Flavius Valerius Constantius. The emperor was influenced by mommy. He believed in Sol Invictus whose symbol was a bright circle with a vertical line and horizontal line running with the centre in the centre of the circle. Pre-Christian Irish had a Cross with a similar stone circle superimposed but no Jesus body. After conversion the Cross with the circle still exists in Irish graveyards (with Jesus on the cross.)
Constantius went to battle in the civil war at the Milvian Bridge. He had a vision or hallucination of a bright cross within a bright circle. With that image he supposedly would win the war. He won. Then he had the brilliant political idea of bringing back unity to the unraveling empire by merging the religions of Mithraism, Sol Invictus, and Athanasian Christianity. At Nicaea in 324 CE, Constantine forced the Christian Bishops to vote allegiance to Trinitarianism and condemn Arianism/Paulism, Ebionites, Nazerites, and Mandaeans forcing them to flee to exile in Barbarian Kingdoms and Persia. Nestorianism and Monophysitism were later condemned as heresies. Unconverted Pagans were largely exterminated or bullied into conversion by the sword by Emperor Theodosius II.
And politics has been influenced by religion ever since.
Sorry, I did not write the gospels. I just tell you what they say without the Catholic spin.
It is confusing but not irrational. Physicists have observed particles appearing and disappearing in a seeming vacuum. A particle is split. A negative smaller particle goes to the left, a positive smaller particle goes right. No matter what the distance if one particle reverses charge negative to positive its distant partner reverses positive to negative. We (or at least I) do not understand that, but it happens and is observed. There may not really be a true vacuum in the cosmos. What is the role of the Hadron Field or the Higgs particle? Math can describe it but we call it Theoretical Physics. However, that is more evidence than there is for a conscious god.
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Spot on Matey!
Can you disprove the literal words of the Gospels?
I doubt that. It would require a split brain.
No, it is because of what he does not believe. It is because he relies on reason, critical analysis, and scepticism. He refuses to adhere to unsupported assumption based on superstition and mythology.
The theologian can be rational in the field of art, poetry, collecting coins, investing a crime by forensic methods. However, in metaphysics the theologian is quite irrational, illogical, and unreasonable. For 1700 years they have defeated challenges by burning challengers at the stake, beheading, drawing and quartering, torture, use of fear and intimidation. Theologians have not defeated free thinkers by rational arguments. They present no evidence and pretend that biblical and church dogma do not contain the obvious errors.
Some Christians are able to compartmentalise mythical thinking that conflicts with reason and logic. They have a rational brain coexisting with gullible circuits. The Rational Brain demands evidence applied to critical analysis, and screening by the Frontal sceptical filter. The Myth holding part of the brain relies on emotional chains to the myth and mounts an interior defence against any challenges.
Rare scientists who are Christian like Dr. Collins of the Human DNA Project achieve this compartmentalisation quite well. He wears his suit and tie to Church on Sunday and sings in the Choir. On Monday, he dons his white lab coat. His brain has shifted thinking modes.
The danger is that some people who try to compartmentalise mythology from reason fail. Either they lose the myth belief and suffer emotional trauma, or they suppress reason and logic and remain stuck in the Magical Universe where rules of reason and logic do not apply. Their brain turns off its sceptical filter. The serious danger of being locked in the fantasy universe in called Schizophrenia (no insult intended). That is because the rational brain is so disconnected from analytical thinking and sceptical filtering that lethal delusions can occur.
Please to not take this as personal attack, for it is not. It is my honest opinion as Medical Doctor and Neuroscientist. I am not a psychiatrist. However, I have seen psychiatric patients in consultation of delusional, religious extreme, irrational, and confused patients to rule out epilepsy, brain tumours, strokes, encephalitis, arteriovenous malformations, post-traumatic brain injuries, harmful drug use (including alcohol) and having ruled them out, I refer them back to the psychiatrist for treatment with neuroleptics.
I admit that greater than 93% of Scientists are Non-theists, 7% claim theism but rarely in the Christian form. I think that most people who are not degree holding scientists are generally rational and sceptical but balance it with religion by the process of compartmentalisation in the Brain.
The best to you, and hope I can call you friend.
Amergin
