Which court? Where? No two nations on Earth share an identical view on “justice.” Are we looking to the concept of justice employed by US criminal courts? Saudi courts? German courts circa 1940? The ecclesiastical courts administered by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages? The court of a David from the Old Testament? The a Code of Hammurabi as interpreted by the courts of Babylon?
Each of these courts had radically different ideas about what constituted justice. Which of these conceptions of the term are you using, and why does that definition necessarily override the Christian conception of justice as briefly described by JRDelerious?
The Law of Identity isn’t so much a law as a definition of identity.
There are also ways to dodge the apparent contradiction. The Beatles were John, Paul, George and Ringo, right? But after the Beatles split up, the four of them in a room, are they the Beatles? Well, yes, and no; it depends on what you mean by the words and becomes a semantic argument.
Likewise, I think this argument is a semantic one. Or better yet, the Christian theology of the Trinity is a semantic riddle to begin with.
In any case, I don’t think there’s much point in this argument. As mentioned above, it won’t convince any Christians (OMG! I must be wrong! There can’t be a Trinity, because LOGIC!). And even a lot of atheists wouldn’t say that it’s a particularly strong argument against Christianity, although it might be a good argument against some specific theological positions held by certain branches.
The different branches of Christianity even disagree considerably about what it might mean. Furthermore, I believe it’s based more on interpretation of the Bible than on literal text in the Bible. It’s an inference based on (a) there is but one God, and (b) three things are described as God or God-like. Here are a couple random googlings from Christian sites defending the concept:
See if you follow the logic. When you take the Bible as Gospel, you have some tricky hoops to jump through to make it all logically consistent, and this is what they came up with.
Okay. Why should the definition of justice used in these courts (which is, arguably, only a couple centuries old) trump the definition of justice as used in the Bible, which is a couple thousand years old?
As was previously explained, this only works if you insist that monotheism implies only one person is God. That claim is not accepted under classical Christian theism.
As the text you quoted was a response to a specific question asked by the author of the OP, as long as it does not become a hijack, I see no reason to object to it.
= = =
Robert163, you started a thread with an open ended question, providing no context, guidelines, or definitions for that discussion, and have provided only the most cryptic responses for attempts to get you go actually set the parameters of the debate. I would strongly urge you to spend the effort to actually establish those parameters. If you continue in your current vein of unresponsive borderline rudeness, I will close this thread.
monotheism = one and only one true god
trinity= father, son, holy ghost
it seems pretty clear cut. and to accept the “christian” explanation of a logical fallacy seems hardly worth even responding too. objective standards are what i am interested in. but i’m not a logician nor a linguist… let me put it another way… is there a non-christian justification of the logical fallacy between the law of identity and the trinity?
But you haven’t explained what that standard is, so it’s impossible for any of us to evaluate your claim. We can’t say whether you’re right that there’s a contradiction unless we know what you mean by “monotheism.”
Then if you want to insist that you are more right to mean what you mean by “monotheism” than what Christian theologians have meant by the term, then we’ll need to know what makes you more right to define it as you do.
What’s the part the doesn’t “make sense, logically speaking”? I don’t know whether you’re trying to use the + and = signs mathematically, but even then, equations like those you wrote all “work” mathematically if all the “letters” are equal to aleph-null.