Summations Only

So then the paradigm is to decide what particular dogma or theological point you want to make, then pick and choose disparate verses that you can then claim infer the point you are wanting to make. No wonder so many different and conflicting groups love "quoting" the Bible so much! Love it when a plan comes together! (no, I never ever watched that show)Just like the verses in Genesis that I've pointed to which support evolution and even abiogenesis by speaking of it actually being the waters and the earth that brought forth all forms of life, albeit under YHWH's command and direction, so there is no conflict between the Bible and evolution. And then you can pick and choose verses that can be implied to show that there is a conflict between the Bible and evolution. Or the pro- and anti-slavery factions who both "quoted" the Bible, implying everything they needed to from the verses that they had picked and chosen in order to show that the Bible supported their position.No wonder so many people love the Bible so much. Whatever your particular position is, you can always find support for it in the Bible.Even hard-core atheists! Since the Bible does say "There is no God". OK, you have to quote-mine the Bible to get that admission, but if creationists and "true Christians" feel so free and self-justified to resort to quote-mining, why can't hard-core atheists do it too? What's good for the goose is good for the gander, right?

I'm sorry, could you say that again?Sorry, could you say it louder?Could you please say it even louder? I don't think you could hear it yet.OK, just joking. You have clearly demonstrated that it is impossible to say anything loud enough for you to hear it.On the question of Trinitarianism, it would truly be interesting to trace through the history of that idea. After the "original Christ event"* congregations formed and developed as did theological ideas about the Christ. Ideas quickly diverged into a variety of churches, many of which imported pagan ideas as they consisted mainly of Gentiles. After a few centuries, several conflicting Christian theologies existed. It was the Council of Nicea that took all those disparate theologies and created out of them one single universal (AKA "Catholic") theology which became the official one. Ah! Christianity! A religion created by committee!Trinitarianism became official at the Council of Nicea. Certain theologies which pre-date Nicea had incorporated that idea, but when and from where? Others didn't (eg, Arianism), but then they lost, didn't they? Though later independently formed Unitarian churches would claim to trace their tradition back to Arianism, which the Catholic Church had declared to be heretical (Faith, are you siding with the Catholics now? When did you have a change of heart?) -- eg, English Unitarianism, our tradition, was different from Transylvanian Unitarianism, as pointed out by an actual Translyvannian Unitarian challenging our minister in the middle of a service.So then, just where did this idea of Trinitarianism come from? What or which early Christian church(es) incorporated that idea in their theology? From what sources? I immediately think of Hinduism and the concept of Brahman-Atman, the universal substance of which everything is made, including the gods, such that any idea of being something or someone separate is purely illusionary, AKA "Maya"** -- of possible interest, "Atman" is philologically related to the German "atmen" (both languages are Indo-European ***) which means "to breath".{FOOTNOTE *
Ed Babinski is a former fundamentalist Christian; I have no idea whether he is still a Christian. He had been the most fundamentalist of fundamentalists, but then he started reading and thinking and he finally left the fold. He has written some books that you can find on amazon.com, most of which contain the testimonials of many others who have also left the fold. He is on FaceBook, mainly linking to blogs about people leaving the fold.In the 1980's, NCSE's Creation/Evolution Newsletter reprinted and "evolutionary tree of Christianity", at the root of which was "the original Christ event". He then parodied a very common creationist claim, that extremely wide variance of the resultant religions could not possibly be descended from a single "Christ event". I could eventually find that graphic, if there is interest.
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For a direct treatment of Maya, refer to the appendix in Hermann Hesse's Das Glasperlenspiel (translated into English either as The Glass Bead Game or Magister Ludi ("Master of the Game") which would be referred to as "The Indian Life".Another famous treatment was by Ambrose Pierce, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, wherein a Confederate sympathizer is hanged at a bridge, but the rope breaks and he escapes by being swept downstream. The rest of the story follows him as he evades Union soldiers while running to return to home. A short French film (with no dialog) based on the story was shown on The Twilight Zone (hosted by a Unitarian); (view it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuP5kUQro40 or else do your own search for it), which I watch in the original broadcast, so that is my primary source. He returns home, sees his wife waiting for him on the porch. He runs towards her and she towards him. And at the last moment, the rope tightens and he dies.There is another classic example that "everybody" knows, but of which I had only heard reference to by a guest speaker in a graduate German class. A sailor falls overboard, but is rescued by a mermaid and then goes through a long series of fantastic adventures, at the end of which he finally finishes drowning. I have no idea what story that is.
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Eg, in a 1980's TV mini-series about a British officer (Ben Cross) in India also raised as a Muslim (female lead was Amy Irving), I recognized the Hindu-ish word for fire, something like "agni", since it is related to the Russian ("agon", "agni" (pl)) and even to the Latin ("ignis", from which we get igneous rock, ignite, etc)).The reason why these languages are even called "Indo-European" is because British philologists studying the languages in the newly-acquired India discovered the very striking similarities between the languages in India and most of the languages in Europe (though not Finnish, Hungarian (which is related to Finnish), Basque). Though the Germans refer to them as "Indo-Germanisch" -- rather ethnocentric of the Germans, don't you think?
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err, Quoioioioioioioioioii! ( the most ugly "Quoi?" I had ever heard in the French Language -- a personal reaction against francophophile/germanophobe tendencies, a line from the the original, Le Grand Blond avec une chaussure noire ).

errr, quoi?What would make you believe that they weren't looking for it. If that was what they had wanted, tben that is what they would have said. Duh?

OK, trinitarianism or not? if you are coming from a trinitarian perspective, you would want to present that. If you are not, then you wouldn't even be thinking of it.

Duh!!!We are operating with an infinitely diffenent iterative factor. In the old days, you could wait for the ink to dry off of your missive. Nowadays your missive could be sent off before you even realize it.'

Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot-Over? Nu?

Oh, yes, they would find exactly that, because that is what they were looking for!

If they had to do so much inordinate implying from such disparate verses, they had to have been looking for it!And you imagine that it just fell into their laps? Really? What a joke!

Yes, that's right. You have described Christianity to a "T". So what's your point? That somehow your own cult is different from the rest? When did that ever happen? The history of all Protestant churches (bar perhaps a few possible exceptions, none of which I'm aware of) is that they split off from another church for any number of reasons, including disagreement over some doctrinal point. In every one of those cases, that doctrinal point immediately became dogma in the new church, by-passing any process of validation by "hundreds of churches". Even in the first few centuries of Christian history, congregations formed and split and generated a plethora of different forms of Christian doctrine, each with its own copy of "Scripture" that supported its own doctrine. And out of that mess one religion was formed by committee, one which was held together by force until centuries later when it then proceeded to splinter anew, creating new dogma upon each split, foregoing any "validation by hundreds of churches". Only the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches had any opportunity to conduct that long process of "validation by hundreds of churches before it's made dogma", but even there the dogma was established from the start.I really do not know what you could be referring to with that statement.

quote:

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"In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Shamrock."
(from Nuns on the Run with Eric Idle, Robbie Coltrane, and Rose Tyler's mum)

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So then my right hand is a five-in-one Godhead?In some object-oriented programming (OOP) educational material for C++, two kinds of relationships are defined between classes (data and function aggregates, such that a class defines a particular type of object which has certain properties (ie, data fields, such as a person would have an age, height, weight, etc) and methods (eg behaviors) ): "has-a" and "is-a".In the "has-a" case, a class has certain other objects; eg, a car has objects called "wheels", an engine, a body, which itself "has-a" several other objects which themselves have have methods and properties, some of which can themselves be objects with their own methods and properties.In the "is-a" case, we are working with inheritance. We can define a class as being a special case of another class. So we create a base class of Animal which has certain properties and certain methods (AKA "behaviors", such as moving, eating, etc). Then we can derive from that base class other classes such as Bird or Reptile or Mammal. A Mammal "is-a" Animal and as such inherits the properties and methods of the Animal class, while it also adds its own properties and methods; sometimes -- OK, often -- it can replace its base classes behavior with its own behavior.In object-oriented programming, you cannot ever afford to confuse "is-a" with "has-a" relationships. If you do, then you have a real mess to have to clean up.The shamrock analogy confuses "has-a" with "is-a". It does not work.Yes, I know, logic has no meaning when it comes to faith. But logic is all that theology can possibly have going for it. Science can go beyond logic, because it can empirically test an idea regardless of what logic says. But theology cannot test anything at all, so all it has to rely on is logic. Without logic, what else does theology have to work with? Just making shit up? Well, certainly we've seen that being done.

Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot-Oscar?To begin with, many fundamentalist and other extreme Christian "denominations" bear all the markings of cults. I'm sure that many, if not most, "mainstream Christians" would view Calvinists in such a light, especially with regards to extremist doctrine that none of them could agree to.Second, "mainstream Christianity" does not exist as one entity, but rather is an abstraction of the commonalities shared by most non-extremist Protestant denominations. It does not actually exist, no more than the abstract Geological Column actually exists. True, both abstractions could yield valuable information, but that still does not mean that you could ever find them existing in nature.You very specifically described a procedural process in which ideas were worked by hundreds of different churches and did not become dogma until after they had gone through that procedural process. But wouldn't that have required those hundreds of different churches in nearly as many different denominations to have coordinated their efforts in that procedural process? In reality, no such procedural process ever existed and no such communication between disparate churches over specific theological ideas ever took place. Nor did any individual denomination wait for concurrence from any other denominations before implementing a theological idea as dogma.If you disagree with that, then present us with the history and the minutes of such procedural deliberations! Otherwise, I'm calling "bullshit!" on your claim. The Church Fathers? And what churches did they pass their writings through? And how many? "Hundreds"? Could you please get me an actual count? Or are we back in the Nam dreaming up counts of enemy killed?And what about the extra-Scriptural teachings that those Church Fathers added? There was a lot going on pre-Nicea, which is why I always suggest strongly that everyone research into their beliefs and where those beliefs come from. In some cases (eg, fundamentalism, dispensationalism) those beliefs are only 100 or 200 years old. In others, you need to go back somewhat further. Of course, in such exercises the truth is ideally supposed to win out, but dogma usually derails the process. It's called Constantinian Law, which enforced religious beliefs. In particular, anyone born Christian who then converted to another religion was subject to the death penalty. Just like Sharia Law concerning apostates who leave Islam. You complain mightily against that aspect of Sharia Law, but you are silent about the exact same aspect of Constantinian Law? A famous medieval or Renaissance Italian rabbi had converted from Christianity to Judaism, but had to keep it a secret to escape capital punishment for it; ironically, when he emigrated to Palestine, he was killed by an Arab. It was in that context that my Rabbinic Literature prof, Rabbi Kalir, had informed the class about Constantinian Law, which remained in effect from the reign of Emperor Constantine (yes, that Emperor Constantine) and the mid-nineteenth century."What force" indeed! No, that was exactly what I was talking about. Before Constantinian Law which the RCC took over enforcing, we saw a divergence of many different theologies. Once Constantinian Law was formed and enforced, any divergence from the committee-proclaimed norm, being termed "heresy", was dealt with quickly and surely, not allowing any divergence. It was only with the Reformation that Christian churches were able to form and to splinter into innumerable forms as was happening pre-Nicea.So what are you imagining that you are disagreeing with?Faith, you just want your own cult to be true. No different from any other believer. But the truth is that yours is no different from any of the others. Get used to it. Sure, you can believe that you're the special one, but please don't expect to be able to convince anybody else about it.Edited by dwise1, : concluding paragraphEdited by dwise1, : convincing others

But you still need to learn that they do not work or else you'll just keep using them.But then, if we just wait 30 minutes or so, then you will forget that they don't work and will continue to use them anyway. You may not know what you are doing, but at least everybody else will know.

No, you just want to believe that is the case. As is so very often the case with creationists and "true Christians", you find your "evidences" so convincing only because you are already convinced. First you talk about being main-stream and now you're talking about being orthodox. And then in the next message you switch around and try to be main-stream again! Make up your mind already!But seriously on the question of where Trinitarianism came from, we really do need to trace that back. Some of the early churches taught it, while others didn't. Early Scripture that taught it were created by the churches that taught it, while the Scripture that didn't teach it were created by those who didn't; some Scripture was selected by committee and some were not, mainly based on how well they complied with the "One True Faith" that they had come up with. But even before then, the idea itself had to have come from somewhere; I only mentioned the Hindu idea because it's a very well-known example.Certainly there has to have been some kind of research on this question. But it would be better to look at non-Christian research. It's just that Christian research, or rather what passes for research among Christians, has a very bad reputation for lying through their teeth. We see it all the time in "creation science". And we see it in their revisionist American history. Indeed, Faith, you yourself fell victim to their outright lies when you posted all those "Founding Father quotes", all of which turned out to be complete and utter lies.Half a century ago, I attended a Protestant church and Sunday School and Vacation Bible School. We were taught that lying is a sin. And now apparently lying is de rigueur for "true Christians". How very sad.

That raises a question: What does the Bible say about molestation? Does it speak for it? Or against it? Or take both sides? Or not even mention it at all?If the Bible is supposed to convey all of "God's absolute morality", then shouldn't it have something very definite to say about a very serious moral problem? A problem that almost everybody of all faiths, including atheists, agree is wrong.And what about something else that almost everybody (albeit more by atheists and less by religious fanatics) agrees is wrong: genocide. Now, we do know that the Bible does address genocide, but the only biblical references to genocide that I know of are God's commands to commit genocide. Does the Bible say anything against genocide?Curious minds want to know.