A3

Hi Kent,

Exactly my point. We are one. It says so many times in the Bible that God is One and we are in His image and likeness, we are one too.
The choices you mentioned, however, normally do not involve your conscience, there are no morals involved, they are not good or bad. I was thinking in the line of ‘to steal or not to steal.’ To tell the truth or tell a lie. Some choices can be really tough. We would love to lie if it meant getting away with something or avoid an embarrassing situation. If we end-up lying we love ourselves more than telling the truth. And it is that love that is being attacked. In fact that is what temptations are, attacks on our loves.

This was the reason why the Jews were ready to stone Him, they understood what He was saying.
The whole concept is even more confusing if you don’t believe you have a soul or spirit. In fact, we are not just a piece of meat, we are a spirit in a body. Swedenborg is very clear that we have a soul, a mind and a brain. The brain is all we can see. Our mind is us, that’s what thinks, loves and feels in us. We see with our mind, not with our eyes, and we think with our mind, not with our brain. There have been blind people who had a Near Death Experience, they could see all sorts of things going on around them and later tell about it.
Another reason for confusion was that Jesus alternated between two states. He was called ‘The Son of Man” or “The Son of God”. At times He was the son of Mary or the Son of God. As the son of Mary He had to fight and overcome a lot of hereditary evil, many temptations. But that was one of the reasons why He was here, to put hell in its place and within boundaries. People in those days could be possessed by evil spirits, that’s how bad it was. So He bore the evils of the world but He did not take them away (just look around you).
And He was the Son of God. After all, it was God who caused Mary to become with child. This in itself is not so strange if we realize that life is not sexually transmitted. It is not the seed that causes or carries life, we can’t give something that is not ours. So technically if you like, God caused Jesus to be born so Jesus was His Son. But throughout His life He put off what was from Mary and He put on the Divine that was from God. Untill the very end, on the cross, where He was tempted to save Himself or save the world. He loved the human race so much that He overcame this last temptation and gave his own bodily life for our sake. At that very moment He became Divine and became one with His Soul, the Father. “All power is given unto Me in heaven and on earth"
The Jews at the time only saw a man, a body that got tired, hungry and could get emotional and cry. The son of a carpenter from Nazareth. All that made it extra tough to see what was going on. To overcome this obstacle He did miracles.
[/quote]Even though we have different personalties and attributes we are still one.[/quote]
Yes, one group, one family but not one person. Even twins are two persons, never one. You are one person with one essense. Your essense is what you are all about, what you stand for. (Dictionary: Essense is the individual property.) There is no more than one divine figure with three aspects, three sides, three features if you will. Just like we are one person with three aspects, sides or features.
Have a good weekend
Adrian

Paul5204

Why is the idea of one God, three persons, a mathematical absurdity? I would submit that, conceptually, it fits geometry rather well. For example, one cube is six squares. If the Cube were God, then there would be no problem with that square called Moshe declaring: "Hear O Israel, YHWH our God, YHWH is one," while at the same time it being the reality that the Cube is made up of six squares.

The noted Jewish philospher Maimonides probably had as much disdain for Trinity as most here, but he reported in his The Guide For The Perplexed, that God could not be exactly compared with me or any other human, ie., whatever attribute you want to ascribe to me, that same attribute in God [if such it can be called] is not merely different, but qualitatively so. If such is the reality, then we had better have something akin to Trinity, or else the God that Maimonides believed in could be exactly compared to him, i.e., God is one person just as Maimonides is one person. Put another way, if God is one person just as I am one person, then in terms of that aspect of personhood, God is EXACTLY like me. Apparently, Maimonides did not recognize the "tension" in his beliefs.

The supposed absurdity or polytheistic nature of Trinity is otherwise simply the result of the subconconscious dragging of the three-dimensional Cube into the two dimensional world of us squares, and then, and only then, ascribing to the Cube its personhood. I have no doubt that the reminder given to some that they saw no form, and the prohibition on images, were both designed to guard against this subconscious dragging of the Cube into the world of us squares.

The Jehovah's Witnesses are big on blasting what they call Christendom over its belief in Trinity. Their handout tract, Should You Believe in the Trinity? [or something like that], is illustrated with images of three-headed humans, etc., followed by the question of whether one wants to worship a freakish three-headed god? No, I don't. But since my God has no form, ie., has no form in the sense that I have a form, he isn't a freakish three-headed God who otherwise looks just like me.

As a final comment, I have used the square-cube analogy for a very specific reason. The Torah makes plain its proposition that God transcends our universe. As is obvious, we do not transcend our universe. But what if we could? Could six of us then unite and be known as a cube? And would that necessarily mean that we would lose our identity as squares? In my square-cube analogy, that is clearly not the case, since it is entirely "proper" to recognize the cube as being a singular, plural entity. Thus, the aforementioned absurdity is truly only an absurdity when we ourselves place a limit on the matter of possibility, ie., rule out the existence of three dimensions. And I have no doubt that if we indeed were squares living in a two dimensional world, that some would be either laughed to scorn or killed because of their insistence that the Cube is the ultimate reality.

daemon

Because this is not analogous to the trinitarian doctrine. It only is if each of the squares are fully the cube, as well.

Trinitarian doctrine cannot be analogized because it does not relate to anything in human experience. Theologians would have us believe this is due to the unique nature of God, while I am inclined to say it is because it is a patchwork mess of ad hoc rationalizations.

Paul5204

Daemon:

In reply to my prior post, you wrote that:

"Trinitarian doctrine cannot be analogized because it does not relate to anything in human experience. Theologians would have us believe this is due to the unique nature of God, while I am inclined to say it is because it is a patchwork mess of ad hoc rationalizations."

With the first line, I agree. And it is indeed precisly because I have no personal experience of anything transcending the universe. But the analogy is the best that I can provide given the limitation. Also, given what I have just said, no surprise that I further agree with that portion of the second line up to the comma, but disagree with the portion thereafter.

You may entirely disagree, as is your right, with my assumption of a transcedent God, but if I am allowed to make that assumption, then you can hopefully see why neither I nor any other believer in a transcendent God will ever be able to provide a "completely correct" explanation of Trinity [since one can never completely and correctly explain that which is beyond one's powers of comprehension].

Now, a question: what do you mean by "It only is if each of the squares are fully the cube, as well." Perhaps I should ask instead: what do you mean by "fully the cube?"

I otherwise have no more intellectual "problem" with my inability to perfectly describe a transcendent singular, plural God than I have an intellectual "problem" with the notion that humanity will also never have a perfect understanding of the universe since we are part of the very thing that we are attempting to study [the incompleteness theorem].

My last comment is not directed personally towards you, but I wish that the critics, skeptics, etc., of a transcendent God would understand that God or no God, the incompleteness theorem does indeed make plain the proposition that humanity's understanding of reality will never be complete/perfect. To put it another way, people in glass houses ought not to be in the habit of throwing stones. Again, these last comments are in no way directed personally at you.

Kent Stevens

In response to some other suggestions it seems more consistent to consider Satan as another divine figure in a polytheistic religion. For in other polytheistic religions bad divine figures such as the god of war or the god of the underground are never the less considered gods. This would mean that the Christain religion has at least the following gods: God the Father, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and Satan. If you are catholic you tend to regard Mary also as a god.

If you go along with this you might feel like you then would have to redefine the traditional definition for monotheistic religions. Islam accepts there is one God and the Devil. Islam though traditionally defined as being monotheistic then believes in two divinely powerful figures. To be strictly accurate it could be defined as a religion with two "gods" which according to my dictionary is ditheism.

In ordinary Christain language god refers to only to good gods, and there is differentiation between good angels and bad demons. But in a normal polytheistic religion there are bad divine figures refered to as gods as well. So it seems that we already have two slightly different meanings to the word God.

Of course religious people will object to this possible redefinition of religions and may accuse me of satanism for example. However, I like pretty much everyone am against evil and I do not waste time praying to Satan.

We are getting down to some fairly basic points of difference. You believe that we have a spirit and I do not. I have not seen scientific evidence to suggest that we can definitely survive death.

I would think that a typical person may have a number of different features or aspects. They may have thoughts, feelings, behaviour, and sensory information. It is simplest to say that you are one person with many characteristics. These characteristics or aspects are different from having distinct different personalities.

Have a good weekend
Kent

A3

Hi Kent,
Hi Kent and others,
I use the Bible as a reference point for whatever is in the realm “of the spirit.” For clarity I will try to compare our human environment with a car. There is one driver (spirit), who interacts with the car by way of the instruments and controls in the passenger compartment (the brain). The luggage compartment stores whatever we want to take along and keep (the memory). The thoughts, feelings, behaviour and sensory information you mentioned are not attached to the car nor part of the driver. The thoughts and feelings are ‘input’ and come in through the car windows and wheels to the driver and are modified by him into a certain behavior (driving style?)
The mind behind the wheel communicates with the outside world through the windows (body language) and the controls like horn and indicators. BTW when our body (the car) gets older things stop working the way they are supposed to.
Here you might also see a trinity, like the driver, the car and his influence on the others on the road. Ultimately the driver controls the car, but the only way you can know or reach the driver is through observing or studying the car.

The most comforting concept that I have learned from reading Swedenborg is that because we live in a spiritual environment, the thoughts that pop into our minds are not our thoughts but are induced. That is good news and bad news The good news is that we don’t have to feel guilty for the bad thoughts that pop into our minds because they are not ours. We are not as deprived, sinful, evil and devilish as the church says we are. On the other hand, the good thoughts we get are not ours either. The bad thoughts come from the devil and are from hell, but the good thoughts are from angels and thus from heaven. This way we are in balance, but we can upset this balance by leaning to either side. We can dwell on and invite the bad thoughts or the good thoughts and THAT is what determines who we are. We create our own environment.
Coming back to the car. It is obvious that the windows don’t see things, the driver does, through the windows. The physical eyes of our body don’t see things either, our mind does by receiving sensory input from them as well as from our ears, skin, etc. The sensory input we get is also not ours, unless we search it out or ‘dwell’ on it. We are free to park our car down-wind of a sewage treatment plant to enjoy the fumes.
This approach is embodied in/based on the words of Jesus: You cannot see heaven, “heaven is within you.”
Adrian

Kent Stevens

I think that both our good ideas and our bad ideas are ours. Our desire to perhaps help another comes from us. The desire to steal also comes from us. Humans are both good and bad, strong and weak, rational and irrational. These tendencies being not manifest simultanously.

How do we know that the desire to steal is from heaven or hell? Perhaps you are just assuming that bad ideas come from hell.

A3

These I consider the mechanics of life. I fully subscribe to the descriptions given by Swedenborg, (which you don't have to). But his explanations make sense and seem very real to me. This is just a tiny part of his fast system (based on the spiritulal sense of the Bible and his own experience).

Well, see above, the way life, and the next life is explained, that is what evil spirits do who are with us. They would love to see us steal and do evil things so we will join them later. Angels are with us too. Again we don't have physical proof. If we did it would defeat the whole purpose of having freedom to go one way or the other. That is why there is such a phenomena as hypnotism, telepathy, near death experiences, deja vu's and many more unexplained events.
Adrian

Kent Stevens

What could be construed as freedom to believe in God or not believe seems to amount to ignorance. If god is all good he should make his presence clear and his doctrines clear. If God existed we would not be having this discussion as it would be crystal clear that he existed and what he wanted. If your boss was ambigious in his instructions and you made a mistake as a result of this, would you not say that your boss made a mistake in not clearly saying what it is that you are to do? But with relgion we have hundreds of different sects saying different things about what God wants or how many Gods exist. So God would be not all good in allowing us to carry on in false beliefs and make mistakes as a result of this. If God existed there would probably be only one religion in the world, corresponding to one true reality.

In terms of the things you say are unexplained I would characterise as things with some sort of explanation verifiable through scientific observation. Only, telepathy seems to be without scientific evidence. There seems to be no scientific evidence for heaven, hell, demons, and angels. These things are part of faith and not part of science.

daemon

Most Christians believe in a personal God as well as the possibility--if not actuality--of revelation. Both of these are "personal experience of something transcending the universe." Are you not a Christian, or are you perhaps some form I have not heard of?

When I say that people have no basis for analogy, this directly denies the possibility of revelation.
There is a word for non-comprehensible concepts--nonsense.
Trinitarian doctrine states that each person of the godhead is God. They are not separable; they are not components of a whole; each is God, but each is not identical to the others. Thus, to analogize in geometry would be to say that each of the sides is identical to the cube, but each side is not identical to each other (a clear violation of identity).
The problem is not that you can't describe it perfectly, it is that noone can describe it at all without descending into gibberish. It would be nice if people would at least restrict themselves to making statements about the entity that they describe that are rationally comprehensible rather than spouting literal nonsense.
I take no offense at this, but I find it amusing that you say we shouldn't be "throwing stones" because we don't understand everything. This implies that we both have equal ground for our beliefs, but that is not the case; one of us has no grounds, either God exists or it does not. If it is my own glass house that is destroyed, so be it.