Summations Only

I know you don't believe the Bible is just the words of men, not God, so I don't know why you'd say this. Maybe you didn't get my point. I meant that there's no point proving the Bible says there's a trinity if it's just words that men made up and not the sacred and inerrant word of God. You can use Great Expectations to prove that Pip served as a companion to Miss Havisham, but it isn't something true about the real world because Great Expectations is a work of fiction. And that's the central issue of this thread, whether the Bible is the inerrant word of God or just the canonization of fictional myths and legends. I think you're wasting your time anyway. You say God is a threesome: God, Jesus and the Holy Ghost. That's like saying there are three political parties in the United States: political parties, Democrats and Republicans. Even if the Nicene creed were a verse in the Bible, it still wouldn't make sense.--Percy

It seems to me that her belief that the Bible is the word of God is exactly the reason why she'd say what she says. The issue is instead that this forum is for questioning the accuracy and inerrancy.Still, I think it is within the scope of discussion to decide exactly what the Bible does say before or in the process of questioning its accuracy.

I don't know why I wrote that the way I did; I agree it doesn't make sense as written. But I'd respond now that you can't compare the Bible, which is many books written by many authors over millennia, to any work of fiction. To derive a complex concept like the Trinity from all those different books does require something supernatural about those books, something the authors themselves weren't even conscious of.And when somebody doesn't even try to understand the Trinity it's awfully hard to discuss it, as you do here: But that is not what the Trinity is and not what I've said. You make one of the typical mistakes about it when you confuse God the Father with the Trinity itself. The three are God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost; all three make up God the Trinity, One God in Three Persons. Occasionally God the Father represents the Trinity in scripture, but you have to understand the concept to know how to read these things.

If you really think that I would expect that you'd take a look at that link you refused to look at because that would tell you what the Bible says about the Trinity.It's a complex subject, lots of separate references are involved. I really don't have the patience to walk anyone through all that right now, someone who is already convinced it makes no sense anyway.

So you need to know the answer before you can read the question correctly? You need to know whodunit so you can decide what clues to look for?You need to know that the Bible is inerrant before you can sweep the errancies under the rug?

We are to understand the Bible by the light of the Bible. Many heresies are the result of taking a concept out of context. When you find a statement that treats God the Father as representative of the Trinity, you can easily misunderstand it unless you know what the Bible says overall about the Trinity.

Not being interested in the details of the conflated maze of illogic Christians use to justify the Trinity within their own minds is not the same as not understanding the Trinity. I understand the Trinity perfectly well enough to know it's nonsense, and the details of the peculiar Christian pathology that allows them to accept it anyway do not interest me. If you want to take us on a traipse through your own personal Alice in Wonderland then I shall watch in fascination, but discussing the details holds no interest for me. All religions have their own particular peculiarities requiring unending apologetics, and they say the same things you do. About Islamic apologetics one website says, "Muslim scholars emphasize on the need to understand the CONTEXT of every verse to understand its implication better," which is very similar to what you just said about understanding the Trinity.--Percy

What you believe is simply what you've been taught since childhood. You've been a Unitarian (heretic) all your life, right? So you don't have to bother thinking about the Biblical basis for the Trinity, you "know" it's nonsense because that's what you've been taught.Trinitarian signing off, over and out.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

This would be incorrect. Unitarianism is very respectful of the beliefs of all the world's religions. That the Trinity is nonsense becomes clear just from watching Trinitarians try to explain the Trinity. For a real hoot read the Wikipedia article on the Trinity - it's where Phat got his diagram.You're ignoring the key point: Your apologetics differ from the apologetics of all other religions only in their details. Why should the particular nonsense of Trinity apologetics interest me any more than, say, Islamic apologetics about the Koran stating that sex is determined after conception? By the way, Islam holds that the concept of the Trinity is a denial of monotheism, which makes perfect sense to me and was my original point to Djufo.--Percy

But it isn't a denial of Monotheism, it's just one of the ways you misunderstand the Trinity. God is ONE is affirmed in the formulation of the Trinity, ONE GOD only, just one, but Three Persons in that one God. This is determined by scriptural descriptions that make it clear that God is One but that the Three Persons are all independent and all have the attributes of God. It's not an invented idea, it's all based on scriptural descriptions that amount to revelations, that come from many different books of the Bible and is not the invention of a single person.[ABE: I like Jonathan Edwards' analogy to the sun: the burning sun is the Trinity as a whole, the orb itself represents God the Father, the light it emits represents the Son of God, the heat it emits represents the Holy Spirit. Three in One. Of course there's always St. Patrick's analogy of the three-leafed clover too. /ABE]Of course the Islamic view makes sense to you, the Trinity is counterintuitive and difficult to grasp. Islam denies the Deity of Christ and so does Unitarianism, nothing easier than that except that it contradicts scripture which clearly requires worship of Christ which would be idolatry if He weren't God Himself. But then you can deny that scripture is God's word and save yourself there. Why not admit that Unitarianism has no basis in anything at all then except the mental insufficiency of its founders, or that your own inability to grasp the Trinity is an insufficiency of your own?Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

See. all that is simply utter nonsense.Your mistake is trying to pretend that the concept of the Trinity makes any sense or could ever be considered as reasonable or logical.It can't.What you need to do is simply admit it is nonsense but that it is also an article of belief. Trying to explain it just makes folk laugh.

Study the scriptural basis for it before you spout your ignorant nonsense.

How about this analogy Faith. A man starts up a very successful business. He manages this business on his own for many years and then his son grows up and the father appoints or anoints the son to represent him and is given authority over the whole business. It would be expected that the employees would give the same allegiance to the son that they did to the father.This of course doesn't mean that the father has lost contact or interest in the business. He continues to send e-mails of encouragement and suggestions to the employees with the hope that the e-mails will be used to improve the business and improve the lot of all the employees by fostering healthier relations between the employees as well as with upper management.The messiah was to be the anointed of Yahweh to redeem Israel. However, God went further than that and gave Jesus was dominion over creation as per Daniel 7. We are connected to him through the Holy Spirit.Does that work for you?

What makes you think I have not Faith? It is one of the best examples of using the Bible to create a new dogma by taking passages out of context and misrepresenting their context.I happen to subscribe to the dogma as out lined in the Nicene Creed but I do not pretend that it is reasonable, logical, rational or understandable.It is an Article of Faith.Edited by jar, : appalin spallin

How can you get any reference to Jesus from Daniel 7 without totally taking material out of context and adding stuff not found there?