I honestly don’t know if I am atheist or not, I really don’t worry about it either way or see much importance in it. I do have a fascination with much of religious philosophy, primarily as it relates to our concept of self. They have God the father, God the son, and God the holy ghost. Speaking just for myself I have a very distinct identity as a father, I have another distinct identity as a son and lastly, I have a distinct spiritual identity. (ethics and morals). But I am still one person! Could this be what the philosopher was referring to when this was written?
Nope. It was an attempt to make the new sect’s view of their putative divine founder fit into the idea that there can only be one deity. Here is the wiki page on Trinity.
No, and in fact the view that God is one person with three distinct roles or aspects is the heresy of modalism. The orthodox doctrine of the Trinity holds that God is three persons, not one person.
It is my understanding that it is 3 but still one.
My family doctrine is that of the paterfamilias, the materfamilias and the holy spaniel that does what it wants, which at the moment is slurping my elbow and demanding that I engage in a tug-of-war for the caterpillar squeak toy.
I am just trying to figure out the philosophy or possible philosophy behind it.
I don’t see how: you aren’t ignorant of things in one identity while knowing them in another, and you don’t say Let Not My Will But Your Will Be Done to your other identity, just like you don’t ask why you’ve forsaken yourself…
True, but we behave as if we are ignorant. I only have one behavior as a father, I only have one behavior as a son and another behavior I carry into the rest of the world. They call it a mystery. But I strongly suspect some reinterpretation along the way. In today’s society these differences are small, but 2,000 years ago I suspect the differences were much more dramatic.
When I saw “not religious” in the title, I clicked in prepared to discuss onions, celery, ,green peppers and variations thereof as the foundation of a recipe.
Never mind. Carry on.
The son might say to the father Let not my will be done, and the I do often ask why I have forsaken myself, I never thought about it before but when I think that my father side is talking to the son side of me. I think there is a message here that we should have 3 strong aspects of our identity, independent of one another while in full communication. It might just be a type of character built into our identities.
I immediately thought of oregano, basil and marjoram, but on reflection your mirepoix is more appropriate.
Why stick to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit if we’re talking (religious) Trinity?
I prefer the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone. Skip all the nebulous stuff about the ‘holy spirit’, and stick to something that has a more immediate comparison to human life throughout the ages.
Triple Goddess (Neopaganism) - Wikipedia.
It’s a trinity that in some form or other (the link mostly talks of the current neopagan interpretation but has links to some historical examples) easily predates Christianity, for what it’s worth.
As for food based trinity IMHO sofrito is the greatest trinity of all, beating out mirepoix or other herb mixes.
I’ve always found this video of St. Patrick explaining the trinity to some Irish peasants helpful.
I doubt it. Even the earliest descriptions of the Trinity concept treat the different identities as separate persons. There’s the whole Baptism with John which has all three appear, clearly separate.
It would seem to be what is called the heresy of Sabellianism, where the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one person with three different characterizations.
I don’t quite agree that it is modalism, as that implies that God takes on each role one at a time, while you (the OP) seem to be arguing you have all three identities at once.
I wondered the same thing, although I did notice that it wasn’t in Cafe Society.
Anyway, one pastor I heard explained the Trinity as analogous to water; steam, liquid water, and ice are all water, just in different forms.
Except that the same body of water cannot be in all three states of existence at the same time.
In the Gospel of Matthew, as @BigT mentiones, there is a passage (Matthew 3:13-17) in which the Father speaks, from the heavens, and in the third person, about the Son, who is standing on the bank of the River Jordan; not only that, but the Father also sends the Holy Spirit (the “Spirit of God” in the passage below) down from Heaven, to Jesus.
This is more than just aspects of yourself being “independent” – the “mystery” is that the three elements of the Trinity are different beings, and yet, are all the same God, and, as such, is beyond what a human could be or experience.
Clearly, you’ve never visited Walker Lake. 
It’s pretty mystical.
In fact, the doctrine of the Trinity is also referred to as the mystery of the Trinity, and there is a strand of thought within Christianity — particularly Eastern Christianity — that the proper response to a mystery is to embrace it and enter into it, not to analyise it and try to understand it.
But that’s only one strand of thought. Other traditions within Christianity do try to explore the concept in an intellectual/analytical way.
Here’s the problem:
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Jesus is believed to be God incarnate.
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But Jesus is recorded in the Gospels as referring to God in the third person (“Your Father in heaven does such-and-such” rather than “I do such –and-such”), and as addressing God in the second person (“Father, if it be your will . . .”). Is he talking to himself? Is he deliberately trying to mislead? What exactly is the relationship between “Jesus” and “God”?
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Tied up with this problem is reflection on what it means to think of God as a person. Part of what makes us people is the relationships we have with others – you can’t be a complete person if you don’t have relationships, and we know that a person who is completely isolated for any prolonged period of time becomes fractured, broken, less than whole. God couldn’t be a perfect person without having relationships. So God must have relationships, but with whom? With us? Yes, but we’re his creation. He created us because he was God, and therefore he was God prior to creating us. And even if we say that, prior to us, God had relationships with the angels, say, well, they’re created beings too, so that doesn’t really answer the problem.
The answer is that God has relationships within Himself. Or rather, God is relationships within himself. “God is Love”, says 1 Jn 4, and love is relationship; it requires a lover and a beloved, and God is both of these things.
God is, therefore, not just Father, Son and Spirit, but the eternal communion (another relationship) or mutual indwelling (ditto) between Father, Son and Spirit. As to how we get Father, Son and Spirit – a trinity, rather than a duality or something with four or more persons, there are scriptural reasons for that, most clearly – though “clearly” is perhaps not really the best word here – set out in the Gospel of John.
(I miss Polycarp. He’d have been all over this.)
If you were an atheist, you’d see easily that the trinity is a simple, after-the-fact rationalization for the deification of Jesus which flatly contradicts the bedrock of monotheism, that there is and can be only one God. So they made up a cockamamie way that “more than one” can equal “one” if you hold your head this way and squint that makes no sense to any rational creature and they refer to it as a mystery that cannot be properly understood by rational creatures.