Number 3 seems a little narcissistic and self-serving to me.
I don’t scoff at the trinity as a unique piece of illogic in the church. It is just another in a long line of illogical beliefs that can only be waved away through blind faith. Close your eyes, stick your fingers in your ears and you can almost make it go away. But not quite. The contradictions are still there eating away at the framework of the church. It just falls into dust.
It’s as crazy as shit. Sometime ago I gave up and treated it as a form of polytheism. It made it easier, but also easier to add other gods. Right now I’m working to differentiate between feast days of gods with big mojo and them I can cast aside with a compliment and a promise of later inquiry.
There is nothing bigoted about pointing out the blindingly obvious truth about your religion being in essence poly.
Quite frankly there is nothing i recognise as ‘Christian’ in your vituberic, ‘look, look - i’m being oppressed’, fully paid up member of the offenderati performance in this thread.
Is it? I mean, outside of the movies, is it?
The Trinity was once explained to me thus:
Think of God as a piece of lunch meat shaped like a can; Look from the top…it is round. Look from the sides it is square. Imagine the father who is love (and the only existence) he wants to share his love, so he splits in half creating the son, the son’s love for the father makes him decide to give half of himself back. Then the father gives half of himself back, forming the holy spirit. Now there are three beings, all equal with the same beginning. Of course the lunch meat is just baloney!!
Ah. Thank you, I hadn’t thought of that verse.
Come to think of it —
God the Father is the ‘star’ of the Old Testament. 39 books.
God the Son is the ‘star’ of the New Testament. 27 books.
God the Holy Spirit gets one or two verses.
You know, you’d think a God could get a literary agent who would cut a better deal. 
If not ,they are over hyping it. Yes the devil is supposed to have a titanic battle with god.
Hanging around since time began and spending his time luring people into evil is not a sinecure. It would require a lot of fantastic powers.
http://www.freeurantia.org/FinalBattle.htm The myth.
I’d make a follow-up comment, but likely I’d be accused of a spam post. 
Okay. We won’t go into him deciding to change the commandments all of a sudden.
I’ve been told that God is so awesome and infinite that we cannot truly ever know God.
Does knowing Jesus mean knowing the subset of God that he spun of to incorporate into Jesus? There is also the difficulty of what knowing Jesus means, but that is not a Trinity issue.
Everything Jesus says distinguishes himself from God. Plus, what does “son of Man” mean in this context? The honor Jesus showed the Father god - paternal honor as in the Ten Commandments - makes perfect sense. This same paternal respect to an aspect of himself doesn’t make a lot of sense.
And here is the killer. If salvation comes through Jesus, why can’t salvation come directly from God given their equivalence? If he is subservient to God, why is it required that salvation go through him? Also, when things are truly equivalent, changing frames of reference does not make them not equivalent. Two things that look equivalent in one frame may not look so in another.
God manifested himself to man in many ways in the Torah without any of these problems. Since God is infinite, any manifestation will be incomplete.
Does Jesus ever explicitly give this equivalence, which I think would be important?
For the record, John 14:9-11 is often cited for the Trinity doctrine (at least for the father-son link). When Phillip asks him “Show us the Father”, Jesus answered:
“Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. 11Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me"
Don’t ask me to defend it, but there it is.
That just sounds to me like Jesus’s is possed. As in the exocist.
Well, yes, Jesus often did refer to the Twelve Disciples as his “posse.”
Ok, well I meant to spell “possessed” forgive me. 
Transmitting the word of God is what all the prophets did, so nothing unusual about that. And God being within him, driving him, is not odd either. Not possession, but again prophecy. Seeing the Father is far more interesting. Now this was John, by which time these concepts were a bit more well developed.
However the question “show us the Father” is curious, since Philip would have known that no one, even Moses, could look upon God. So this verse has to be metaphorical. Notice also that Jesus here does not declare equivalency, which would be easy to do at this point.
The Holy Ghost gets in because he is the actual father of Jesus.
“Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost…But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the LORD appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost.” Matthew 1:18, 20.
Note: The angel did not tell Joseph that Mary was impregnated by GOD, but by the Holy Ghost.
Luke 1:34: “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.”
Note: Gabriel did not say he shall BE the son of God but that he will be “called” the son of God.
Different question: Did John the Baptist baptize people only in the name of God? Or in the names of God and the Holy Ghost? He knew about the Holy Ghost: “he that sent me to baptize with water, the same said unto me, Upon whom thou shalt see the Spirit descending, and remaining on him, the same is he which baptizeth with the Holy Ghost.” John 1:33
Sounds like three separate entities to me.
I’m not disputing that, I’m asking whether, within Christian doctrine, the conclusion/outcome of that battle is uncertain. I didn’t think it was, but I have seen it portrayed that way a fair bit in popular entertainment.
You mean when Jesus said, in contradistincton to the legalism of the Phariseers, that all the commandments can be summarized by two of them: Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18? Or did you mean when he said to go beyond bare compliance to the spirit behind them?
That’s nice. The concepts of transcendence and inscrutability are as old as the Book of Job, and probably go a lot further back. But what does that have to do with Trinitarian Christian theology?
I think you’re mistaking something here. The Son and the Holy Spirit are not New Testament add-ons to God v1.0, the basic O.T. version, now tagged "Father: – they are three oersons that are integral parts of the God who has always been there. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” But “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God … and without Him was nothing created that was created.” And “the Spirit of God” that hovered over the waters and came upon Isaiah is the same Holy Spirit promised in John 14 and which descended in Acts 2. Think, if you will, of an editor buying stories from ‘Ellery Queen’ and, inviting ‘him’ to a dinner – and finding out that EQ is the collaboration of two men. One author, two people. Just like one God, three persons.
This gets off into something different, and equally confusing – the hypostatic union. To quote the Council of Chalcedon, Jesus Christ is truly God and truly man. As man, He exemplifies to others the proper relationship of man to God. He prays to His Father, for example. But there are occasions when he acts with divine authority, as well.
But this is precisely the point: Salvation comes through Jesus because of His particular role in the divine economy of salvation – but it comes from God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If you are given a gift by your sister-in-law which is ‘from her family’ and clearly shows that your brother and your niece had a hand in choosing and preparing it, who is it from: the woman who handed it to you, or all three of them together?
You are correct, though, that there is a frame of reference that raises serious questions about Trinitarian theology – Jesus’s will. I had as lief not get into that in this thread but will be glad to explore the traditional understanding and possible issues with it elsewhere if you like.
Correct. I would not say otherwise. This is why I disstinguish myself from those who term themselves ‘Bible-believin’ Christians"
Does Jesus ever explicitly give this equivalence, which I think would be important?
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Well, “I and my Father are one”. “Before Abraham was, I AM” (and the other ‘I am’ statements in John’s Gospel, which are explicitly written, and presumably spoken, with the ‘I am that I am’ construction. Add the Great Commission, Jesus’s last words in Mathew: “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit…” Perhaps Diogenes might speak to the significance of the Johannine Comma.
This has much more to do with Dante, Milton, and Left Behind (and popular misconception) than with the evolving Jewish and Christian concepts associated with Satan.
That doesn’t qualify as myth – it was made up by the writers of The Urantia Book within my lifetime, and has little or nothing to do with any version of Christianity.
Doing that is what a lot of Talmudic scholarship is about. But the Pharisees did not invent the dietary law, and saying that it is okay to eat pork if you are starving is a lot different from saying you can have it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Jesus himself did not relax this rule, but he must be ok with it.
Because everyone talks of knowing Jesus, and knowing God through Jesus. With no trinity, knowing Jesus is somewhat possible, with it, it is not. I’m using “know” in a more correct sense than the people who “know” which side of a football game God roots for do.
I used to read a poem in services about God having no form. God has always been a spirit, so distinguishing God and the Holy Spirit in any way seems pointless. It’s like considering the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob different in some way from the Lord of Hosts.
Your analogy doesn’t work very well, since Ellery Queen is two people, despite the lack of understanding of the editor. Is there any difference between a book written by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore and one written by Lewis Padgett? There is not the kind of equivalence I think the Trinity implies.
And there is the incoherence. No one truly man can be truly god, since being truly man is having the limitations that come from mortality and lack of knowledge and certainty. So that is the problem. Any council can vote for the existence of a four-sided triangle, but that doesn’t make the concept any more plausible.
But what Christianity says is that neither your brother or your niece can give it to you.
I should have know it shows up in John. I was thinking of quotes which are more plausibly directly attributable to Jesus, but that opens up a whole 'nother can of worms, and not being on a diet of them, we can skip it. Consider my question answered.