Sorry, I should have been more clear that my remarks were addressed to Arkcon, and were intended as an expansion on yours.
So, he’s god’s consigliere!
If you don’t believe Jesus is God, you are something else, you are not a Christian. It’s pretty much the definition of Christianity.
Christian here, but hardly the smartest or most expertly. Just a guy.
I think it is important to understand a couple things.
- God exists outside time. Bible says 1,000 years is a day and a day is 1,000 years. The idea of Jesus starting his existence at his earthly birth is wrong. Bible says he was there in the beginning at the creation of the world.
- It’s kind of strange that Jesus became a human, existed in our time, and was kind of limited in human ways. Chose to do it to sacrifice self for evil of the world.
- God is not limited to one personality like humans. While some think of the trinity(Fahter, Son, Holy Spirit) as three gods, it’s just one god manifesting in three distinct ways. God is vastly complex, far beyond our full understanding, and has chosen to reveal himself(itself?) in three clear ways. One as “father”, the God we think of really commonly. One as the son, Jesus. One as the spirit, which I don’t really get how to explain.
Anyway, I don’t claim to understand or have citations for my two points above. But I think it relates to your question and I hope it helps.
Jesus, as part of the Trinity, was actually part human and in my mind closest to me. And as He was the form to suffer and die for me, why would any of the other names be any better to call upon? It doesn’t mean that I don’t; more that He (Jesus) is, in internet terminology, the “default setting”.
A side note: Christianity, along with Judaism and Islam (and others), are called “Abrahamic Religions” – that is, they all trace their roots back to the worship of the God of Abraham.
That said, I know a number of Christians who vehemently insist that Jews and Muslims are not worshiping the same God as Christians do, because they don’t recognize the Holy Trinity.
By the usual theology, fully God and fully human. At least on the RCC side of the alley, dunnow about the Orthodox side.
My favorite Christmas carol involves diapers; I like it precisely because it’s about God making Himself fully human. A baby, dependent on His mother and (putative) father, doing all those things that babies do.
There’s no agreed-upon definition of Christianity.
I’m a Christian and I believe Jesus is definitely not God. (because I believe God is a psychological construct and not any kind of being)
Um, then you aren’t down with the Nicene Creed or any of that jive?
You may call yourself a Christian, but I would guess that virtually all Christian denominations would not. Leaving UU’s to one side, of course.
The problem here is, if believing Jesus was a good man who said some very wise things makes you a Christian, then practically everybody’s a Christian. Because how many people who have heard enough about Jesus to have an opinon don’t agree with that?
If your definition is so broad as to be all-encompassing, it fails to define. This isn’t about Christianity; this is true in general.
Including Muslims, who believe that Jesus was the “penultimate prophet,” before Muhammad.
I think it has been covered, but to sum up. In pretty much all Christian doctrine, Christ is God. God the Father, God the Son (Jesus) and God the Holy Spirit are the same being in three persons - coeternal and coequal in all things. Jesus is not a human with God’s power or the biological son of God (though he is called the Son) He is God made flesh - fully human and fully divine. The nature of being fully human did of course make some aspects of his divine nature impossible and thus put on hold. Jesus on Earth was not everywhere as an example, it would seem he gave up some omniscience in order to experience humanity fully, but he was still fully divine and one supposes upon jettisoning the meat sack he was in once more experienced reality in the way that God always does. So, praying to ‘God’ or praying to ‘Jesus’ amounts to essentially the exact same thing. Christians are monotheists, God the Father and God the Son aren’t sitting on top of Mt. Olympus having debates over the best way to answer prayers or arguing that someone praying to ‘Jesus’ deserves more credit than someone praying to ‘God.’ They are the same being comprised of three persons.
The Trinity is a confusing doctrine and I’ve heard a billion metaphors to get at the root of it and I don’t think any do it justice because ultimately we are all physicalists and trying to apply a physical metaphor to a transcendent concept is always rife with problems. One of the better metaphors is to consider ourselves since we ourselves are transcendent beings albeit ones that are extremely connected to the physical world. I think that we can all agree that we’re all ‘one being’. There isn’t another senoy out there plodding around or at least if there is, it’s not the same being as “I” am. At the same time, what am ‘I’? Am I the body that I see in the mirror? A 40-year-old guy with a Dad-bod and a hipster beard? That’s definitely me, but is it really me? Am I more the chemical reactions in my brain that interpret the light reflecting off of that Dad-bod and give it a coherent shape within my brain? Maybe I’m the brain itself and the body is just some sort of vessel that carries ‘me’ around. Or am I perhaps the billions of single-cells that share DNA and somehow work in concert to achieve an unknown goal? Maybe I’m the voices in my head that argue whether I need to lose that pot-belly or grab another slice of pizza? How many times have we felt that there are competing people inside of us ‘Good senoy’ who wants to exercise and eat veggies and ‘Bad senoy’ that wants to binge watch ‘Parks and Rec’ while shoving ice cream in his face. We certainly recognize that there is only one ‘me’, but it sometimes feels like there are competing mes and when we really start to think about it, I think the nature of our conciousness can become confusing. And that confusion is just for ourselves, largely physical beings of limited scope with whom we are certainly very well acquainted. I think that we can attempt to very loosely scale this up to a completely transcendent being who is not limited in nature and I think that it’s perhaps easy to see how multiple persons can be in one being.
I’m an atheist and I think God is a psychological construct. That is pretty much proven, and is true whether or not you think God is some kind of being.
That’s assuming I understand what you mean by psychological construct.
One could make a pretty good case that reality is a psychological construct, for what it’s worth.
Good thing we’ve got that settled!
Cite for this pretty-much-proof?
I’m not sure what I’m supposed to mean by it; I’ve probably misused the words to try to find a way to say what I meant.
I think God should properly be a topic (or part of a bigger topic) in all elementary psychology textbooks - AND NOT be a topic in any other field of study. I think the concept of “a god” naturally occurs to people, that it’s good and right as a psychological fact, and that the problem with God is that people “project” (I’m likely misusing that term) their internal mental state and imagine that it has an external reality.
Somewhat similar to if I dream of a unicorn and then spend the rest of my life preaching about the unicorn because I saw it in my dream so it must be around here somewhere.
God is all in your head, in a good way, but please stop thinking that your dreams/imagination/psychological processes reflect physical reality. Even if all your friends had the same dream. That’s what I mean, sort of.
Perhaps my opinion has been properly (or at least more coherently) stated by others and has a name.
My only comment is that the Abrahamic God (unless you’re Mormon) is transcendent and by definition doesn’t reflect physical reality, although one could say he impacts physical reality. His only immanence would be in the Incarnation of Christ provided you’re Christian and perhaps in the sense that the Holy Spirit might be immanent.
I’m saying God does not have an existence in any sense but the dream/imagination/Jungian-archetype sense. I’m saying that God has never acted in any way, or had any effect on nature or the world, other than as a dreamlike inspiration for humans to act. I’m saying God is immanent in precisely and only the way that unicorns are immanent. I don’t think that’s quite the usual interpretation.
That’s what I was guessing. Sounds good to me.
However I think the God concept should also be studied in sociology and history, since it is hard to understand much of either without understanding the concept of god adopted by different cultures.
True. God may not be real, but the existence of large groups of people who worship Him/Her/It certainly is.