Bible Questions?

Good point.

 

A question dodged perhaps?

 

Who is refered to at the end of 1 John 5:20?

some translations read "He is..." while some read "This is...". To me it clearly indicates the Divinity of Jesus (and not an unequal divinity to God)

 

If you read all of 1 John 5:18-20, it's pretty easy to see it's not talking about the divinity of Jesus.

 

I did read it all. My impression was that it was a reference to Jesus.

 

(1 John 5:18-20) We know that every [person] that has been born from God does not practice sin, but the One born from God watches him, and the wicked one does not fasten his hold on him. We know we originate with God, but the whole world is lying in the [power of the] wicked one. But we know that the Son of God has come, and he has given us intellectual capacity that we may gain the knowledge of the true one. And we are in union with the true one, by means of his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and life everlasting.

If you already believe that Jesus is God then I could see how you would get that impression but to me the scripture is talking about God and then it introduces Jesus the Son of God, and that he has given us the capacity to know the true one or God. We are in union with God by means of Jesus. The final statement is stating the knowledge Jesus has given us is of the true God and life everlasting.

 

What is the holy trinity and what is the point of it?

If you have the base of an entity that is supposedly omniscient whats the reasoning behind needing a trinity at all, it would seem god could handle it on his own in just one form.

 

Holy Trinity is the ray of creation.
Thought, word, and deed.
Absolute, quantum, physical.

 

The Trinity is a pagan doctrine absorbed by apostate "Christianity" and it is not supported by the Bible.

The point of it is to disguise the true nature of God and to divert true worship away from God.

 

If God is invisible and infinite how would we ever know him? Hence, the need for God to appear in different forms. If he's omnipotent why couldn't he? I don't think God is as simple as Father completely separate from his son. It's much more mysterious than that.

 

God is invisible?

If he had infinite powers could he not allow humans to know of him in his real form, are you implying that it cannot controls it's power?

 

That's what Jesus is for. That we may know him in a form we can see and touch. Also, the Holy Spirit that we may know him within ourselves.

 

Again I gotta say, for an omnipotent being that is supposedly loving why would he need such a crude way to present himself, I'm referring to human sacrifice.

Can it be said that god knows the death roll of every creature that has ever lived or will live in the future?

Can it be said that he knows every beings life intimately and completely?

Can it be said that god exists outside of what we perceive as time and experiences all things simultaneously?

If so where(and how)does free will fit into this picture?

If not how can god be considered omniscient?

 

And what "pagan" religion did it come from? I can't think of any in the Roman world at the time that Christianity would have absorbed.

 

The dogma of the Trinity states that We believe in One God--who exists in three distinct and separate persons...Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. All are God, and more importantly God is all three. The Father eternally begets the Son. The Holy Spirit proceeds from both the Father and from the Son.

The Trinity is not "needed", it simply is. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not three aspects or modes of God (this was declared heresy in the third and fourth centuries) or nor are they three separate beings united in Purpose (LDS), but united in essence. What they are is God.

Also heresy is the idea that the Father suffered on the cross. Only the Son, both fully human and God, suffered on the cross.

OWB: How are we to be baptized, according to Scripture?

 

So many questions.
Let's go back to the Trinity; God in three "persons'. Actually, its personae--the masks worn by players in the Greco-Roman theater. You and I are single individuals, but Freudian psychologists would say we consist of an id, an ego, and a superego. And supposedly we're made in the image and likeness of God. Hmmm.

"Human sacrifice" is a metaphor for the triumph of the human spirit over the cross, a symbol of tyrannical establishment oppression.

At the moment I'm into panentheism (not to be confused with pantheism) and process theology, which would say that yes, God knows the death role of every creature that has ever lived, because (S)he's partly a part of them, and vice versa. (S)he knows every being's life intimately and completely, because (S)he's in our heads, our hearts, our... About as intimate as it gets.

Free will is the indeterminancy God has given to humans and other things in the universe. God has exercised His/Her power to limit His/Her own power to control these things or to know exactly how they will ultimately act, although (S)he has a pretty good idea because of the natural laws (S)he instituted and the predictability of behavior.

God can be considered to be omniscient because (S)he knows everything that can be known, within the constraints of free will and indeterminacy.

Is it true? I'll go along with process theologian C. Robert Mesle, who replies "I don't know....it could be true....It embraces and works with the confusing facts of life, suffering, ambiguity, scientific insight, religious pluralism, feminism, and ecology, while traditional theologies seem to me to view these as embarrassments to be accommodated or explained away."

 

So in your mind there was no literal sacrfice?

You know the inner workings of gods mind so well I'm beside myself.

What would give you the impression that free will is something that was delivered unto people, in one stanza you state that god knows intimately everyones life in the next you say that it has limited it's own power of omnipotents in matters of personal choice, which is it?

White noise.

 

May be this will help you out:

THROUGHOUT the ancient world, as far back as Babylonia, the worship of pagan gods grouped in threes, or triads, was common. That influence was also prevalent in Egypt, Greece, and Rome in the centuries before, during, and after Christ. And after the death of the apostles, such pagan beliefs began to invade Christianity.

Historian Will Durant observed: “Christianity did not destroy paganism; it adopted it. . . . From Egypt came the ideas of a divine trinity.” And in the book Egyptian Religion, Siegfried Morenz notes: “The trinity was a major preoccupation of Egyptian theologians . . . Three gods are combined and treated as a single being, addressed in the singular. In this way the spiritual force of Egyptian religion shows a direct link with Christian theology.”

Thus, in Alexandria, Egypt, churchmen of the late third and early fourth centuries, such as Athanasius, reflected this influence as they formulated ideas that led to the Trinity. Their own influence spread, so that Morenz considers “Alexandrian theology as the intermediary between the Egyptian religious heritage and Christianity.”

In the preface to Edward Gibbon’s History of Christianity, we read: “If Paganism was conquered by Christianity, it is equally true that Christianity was corrupted by Paganism. The pure Deism of the first Christians . . . was changed, by the Church of Rome, into the incomprehensible dogma of the trinity. Many of the pagan tenets, invented by the Egyptians and idealized by Plato, were retained as being worthy of belief.”

A Dictionary of Religious Knowledge notes that many say that the Trinity “is a corruption borrowed from the heathen religions, and ingrafted on the Christian faith.” And The Paganism in Our Christianity declares: “The origin of the [Trinity] is entirely pagan.”

That is why, in the Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics, James Hastings wrote: “In Indian religion, e.g., we meet with the trinitarian group of Brahmā, Siva, and Viṣṇu; and in Egyptian religion with the trinitarian group of Osiris, Isis, and Horus . . . Nor is it only in historical religions that we find God viewed as a Trinity. One recalls in particular the Neo-Platonic view of the Supreme or Ultimate Reality,” which is “triadically represented.” What does the Greek philosopher Plato have to do with the Trinity?

Platonism

PLATO, it is thought, lived from 428 to 347 before Christ. While he did not teach the Trinity in its present form, his philosophies paved the way for it. Later, philosophical movements that included triadic beliefs sprang up, and these were influenced by Plato’s ideas of God and nature.

The French Nouveau Dictionnaire Universel (New Universal Dictionary) says of Plato’s influence: “The Platonic trinity, itself merely a rearrangement of older trinities dating back to earlier peoples, appears to be the rational philosophic trinity of attributes that gave birth to the three hypostases or divine persons taught by the Christian churches. . . . This Greek philosopher’s conception of the divine trinity . . . can be found in all the ancient [pagan] religions.”

The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge shows the influence of this Greek philosophy: “The doctrines of the Logos and the Trinity received their shape from Greek Fathers, who . . . were much influenced, directly or indirectly, by the Platonic philosophy . . . That errors and corruptions crept into the Church from this source can not be denied.”

The Church of the First Three Centuries says: “The doctrine of the Trinity was of gradual and comparatively late formation; . . . it had its origin in a source entirely foreign from that of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures; . . . it grew up, and was ingrafted on Christianity, through the hands of the Platonizing Fathers.”

By the end of the third century C.E., “Christianity” and the new Platonic philosophies became inseparably united. As Adolf Harnack states in Outlines of the History of Dogma, church doctrine became “firmly rooted in the soil of Hellenism [pagan Greek thought]. Thereby it became a mystery to the great majority of Christians.”

The church claimed that its new doctrines were based on the Bible. But Harnack says: “In reality it legitimized in its midst the Hellenic speculation, the superstitious views and customs of pagan mystery-worship.”

In the book A Statement of Reasons, Andrews Norton says of the Trinity: “We can trace the history of this doctrine, and discover its source, not in the Christian revelation, but in the Platonic philosophy . . . The Trinity is not a doctrine of Christ and his Apostles, but a fiction of the school of the later Platonists.”

Thus, in the fourth century C.E., the apostasy foretold by Jesus and the apostles came into full bloom. Development of the Trinity was just one evidence of this. The apostate churches also began embracing other pagan ideas, such as hellfire, immortality of the soul, and idolatry. Spiritually speaking, Christendom had entered its foretold dark ages, dominated by a growing “man of lawlessness” clergy class.—2 Thessalonians 2:3, 7.

 

We've already been up and down this road, so if you don't remember you can just look it up.

But it is interesting to see how others answer these questions and how you respond.

 

Not a need. A function of the limitations of our sensational awareness.

Knowledge is being shared.

There is only one will.