[[It was only resolved by ruling all opposing views heresy and anyone openly holding them was executed.]]

Your history is about as good as your theology. Been reading Dan Brown?

There was never a period when non-Trinitarians were executed for denying the Trinity. Arius died an old man of natural causes. The only case I can think of that comes close was Michael Servetus in Calvin’s Geneva, and the main reason they executed him was his attitude (“I will set this land to rights,” etc.).

Gee, I wonder how that simple identity managed to escape guys like Augustine and Aquinas. They must’ve been pretty stupid to miss something so obvious.

They didn’t miss it, they just decided it was how things were and ruled that it was a fundamentally unanswerable question. In other words they completely dodged the issue the same way you did with the problem of evil, they said God was beyond human understanding. That is a fairly common response to such contradictions, it seems. This has been a well-known theological difficulty from the earliest days of Christianity. It was only resolved by ruling all opposing views heresy and anyone openly holding them was executed.

An electron is both a particle and a wave. The particle is an electron. The wave is an electron. But the wave is not a particle, and the particle is not a wave.

No, the motion of an electron (and other very small particles) is more similar to the motion of a transverse wave on our scale, while the measurement of electrons is more similar to that of a solid object on our scale. To say it a different way, movement follows a wave equation while measure position follows the rules of particles.

There are several key differences. First, the particle is still an electron in all cases. We are not saying it is both an electron and not an electron, which is what people are saying with the trinity. Second, the two sets of rules it follows are not followed simultaneously, that is it behaves as if it were a particle in some situations and a wave in other situations. The trinity holds its different properties at the same time.

Third, there is nothing inherently self-contradictory here anyway. We are used to, on our length scale, particles following a certain motion pattern and waves following a different motion pattern. We are used to particles having certain properties when we try to measure their position while waves have different properties. In our scale those two sets of properties always appear together. But there is no a-priori reason why those particle motion and position properties have to go together. There is nothing inherently self-contradictory here since the motion and measurement are two different properties of an entity. We simply assumed they were dependent on each other. We are simply seeing in subatomic particles a combination of these two properties that we have do not see in our length scale. In other words, these two properties are more independent of each other than we had realized. In the trinity, we are talking about a being that has multiple versions of the same properties, and expresses these multiple versions simultaneously.

An electron is both a particle and a wave. The particle is an electron. The wave is an electron. But the wave is not a particle, and the particle is not a wave.

Looks like quantum mechanics is self-contradictory. We’d better stop believing in it.

The Father = God
The Son = God
The Holy Spirit = God
The Father ? The Son
The Son ? The Holy Spirit
The Holy Spirit ? The Father

So we have a basic violation of the transitive property. That is, A=B, and B=C, but A?C.

More fundamentally we have the law of identity, which states “A is A”, or that “something is itself”. For the trinity to be valid, you must throw out this property, instead holding that something can be both itself and not itself at the same time, or “A is A and A is not A at the same time.” Such a proposition is obviously self-contradictory, and worse yet is self-contradictory on several levels.

[[What you are describing is a being that holds mutually exclusive properties, a being that is by definition not self-consistent]]

What definition? Certainly not the one I’m using. What properties of God are “mutually exclusive?”

“Remember, these are the same people that will turn around the next minute and try to convince you that evolution is full of nonsense.”

And your proof for this broad-brush statement? Perhaps you projecting just a little?

Look, live and let live. Just because someone believes that crystals and tea leaves will help them win the lottery, let them have their security blankets, just as long as no one else gets hurt.

Do we feel so superior that we have to go around knocking down other people’s sand castles for their own good?

I agree that we need to fight non-scientific reasoning when it affects the good of the community. But dumping on folks because they are incapable of thinkning logically and clearly?- that just strikes me as cruel and spiteful.

But we do have ways we can analyze those things. They are fully self-consistent and can be related to other aspects of the self-consistent mathemtical system on which they are based. They are ultimately derived from a few basic, independent axioms. What you are describing is a being that holds mutually exclusive properties, a being that is by definition not self-consistent, either lacks any basic axioms or has ones that conflict with each other, and you tell us we should just accept these inconsistencies for no reason other than your assertion that these inconsistencies are merely due to our fundamental lack of ability. In other words, you are simply defining God as a being for which any apparent inconsistencies are irrelevant and fundamentally impossible to resolve.

So on one hand we have components of a wholly self-consistent set, things we can validate in terms of a set of consistent fundamental rules, things which themselves we cannot conceptualize but which are built out of simpler rules and components that we can conceptualize. On the other hand we have something that is completely inconsistent, does not have any consistent rules we can understand, and if it has components at all are all fundamentally beyond our ability to conceptualize. I fail to see how the two concepts are at all related.

[[The message of Job is that if there’s an answer to the Problem of Pain, it’s not one human beings can understand.
Do you actually expect this answer to be satisfying to non-religious people? ]]

No, and I think I said that explicitly. Nonetheless, whatever our emotional reactions to such an answer, there do exist problems that a human mind cannot comprehend. You can’t hold the whole proof of LaPlace’s theorem in your mind at once, for example. Nor can you envision four-dimensional space.

It meant that, to me, nobody had a lock on what God wanted. It even meant that we couldn’t know there was or wasn’t a God, and that living a good life was our responsibility, and our only legacy.

Beyond that, it’s fascinating to research some of Job and see references to Rahab, another rebellious angel representing the sea, and wonder if instead it represented early conflicts in a pantheon of followers. The sea-god vanquished by the god of the mountain when followers moved inland. Egypt is a good example of pantheon consolidation, and rotating power as Osiris, then Amun, then Osiris again gained domination.

But it all makes sense now!

I’d also add that I have never had a bad experience in church either, and I dare say that the majority of atheists are exactly the same.

Barton, cranky? Surely you jest?

Blinky, well, no they are not harming anyone, but they are making themselves, and their message of Christianity look foolish. There is a good message within Christianity, care for others, caring for the poor and so on, but when people start seeing Jesus in potatoes and other food items, it kind if distracts from that, don’t you think? Remember, these are the same people that will turn around the next minute and try to convince you that evolution is full of nonsense.

It’s not that I don’t *trust* God. In my opinion, there’s nothing there to actually trust. Perhaps I just don’t have the right type of brain to understand what the rest of the religious people of the world understand about God, but I just don’t see any evidence for a God and I just cannot believe in one. My sceptical view often uses Occam’s Razor in analysing arguments, and I find the idea of a man-made god takes far fewer assumptions, and seems a lot more plausible.

Based on a (non-scientific) sampling of comments to posts about religion, I have to assume a lot of people here had some really bad experieinces with church early in their lives.

Yes, because of course it is simply impossible that people could be opposed to religion on purely logical or empirical grounds. There must be some event early in their lives that caused it. Yep, that must be it.

I hate to break it to you, but I am no fan of religion but I never had a bad event with a church at any point of my life (besides seeing people throw reason, evidence, and logic out the window, which I must admit I consider pretty bad).

What harm is being done?

I personally think, and suspect others here do as well, that accepting unreason and superstition is harmful to people. It leaves them less able to effectively deal with the real world, and leaves them vulnerable to deception both by charlatans (intentional or otherwise) and by themselves. People constantly lose their life savings, their health, and even their lives because they cannot tell the difference between fantasy and reality. There are the occasional huge cases like the Heaven’s Gate and Jonestown mass suicides, but their are constant, less publicized cases. Faith healer bilking their followers out of massive amounts of money while living on luxury, homeopaths telling their clients to use plain water instead of proven medication to prevent or treat life-threatening diseases like malaria. You are forgetting that objects like these can sell for tens of thousands of dollars.

The message of Job is that if there’s an answer to the Problem of Pain, it’s not one human beings can understand.

Do you actually expect this answer to be satisfying to non-religious people? Gareth actually covered this one in point number 4, and he is right that it is the ultimate cop-out, the ultimate non-answer. It can be used to explain away anything. “Because God wants it to be that way” can answer any question, and thus answers no questions.

But you should think hard about, when you were looking for the answer, what answer would have pleased you more — proof of God’s goodness, or proof that there wasn’t any God.

It isn’t a question of what is pleasing to us, it is a question of what is true. I would be pleased if I could fly through the air just by thinking about it, but that doesn’t make it true. The answers we get are not always the ones we want, the question is whether you have the strength to accept them anyway.

Well, you miss the point on several fronts. FIRST, I would wholly disagree that “a lot of people here had some really bad experiences with the church early in their lives”. That’s always the cop-out argument of the holy righteous… if you question the validity of the Church and its tenets, then it’s only because you had a bad experience with the church and so now you hate it and are jaded.

Feh. Not at all the case with I’d say most of us here. Just a bunch of rational, critically thinking folk who prefer to think for ourselves rather than be told what to think and not question it. (And no, that does not go for all Christians… in fact there are at least a few critically thinking and rational Christians on this board… Barton for example… although he’s a bit cranky at times… hehe…)

SECOND, I would say the PROBLEM with seeing signs to make them feel better, and the reason we make such an issue of it, is because it takes critical thinking out of the equation… and when you remove critical thinking… and then you start spreading that way of thinking to others who might be easily manipulated for whatever reason… well, that becomes dangerous.

Certinaly in this case I doubt seeing Jebus in a potato will lead to the downfall of civilization as we know it… but the THOUGHT process behind blindly believing such a thing just MIGHT. See the connection? And why we continue to rail against such silly stuff?

No, I don’t think you got it. The message of Job is that if there’s an answer to the Problem of Pain, it’s not one human beings can understand. That shouldn’t be too surprising. Who says a human brain, at this particular point in our evolution, should be able to solve any given problem? As I said earlier, it’s not an emotionally satisfying answer, but it’s a logical one.

I know, on other grounds, that God is real and that he is good. Therefore, I assume that there is an answer to the problem of pain, even if I personally never find out what it is.

It just comes down to whether you trust God or not. Most people nowadays don’t. But you should think hard about, when you were looking for the answer, what answer would have pleased you more — proof of God’s goodness, or proof that there wasn’t any God. It’s an extremely personal and highly emotional issue for many people, and I am suspicious of anyone who claims to have a glib answer.

So two people whose lives are deeply entwined with their religion think they see a sign from God. Such sign makes them feel better about themselves and their faith. They let other people know about what they found (perhaps to inspire similarly inclined believers?). What harm is being done? Are they forcing other people to share their belief? Are they laughing at and dengrating those who don’t share their belief?

Jeez, for a crowd that prides itself on its intellectually superiority, you guys sound like a bunch of snotty seventh-graders.

I guess the closest answers I can get to my question from it is that:

1) God rewards the righteous eventually,
2) God destroys the wicked and the innocent together,
3) Job shares the world with other creatures which have needs which God must provide for, which sometimes can only be satisfied by taking the lives of others,
4) God does what he does – puny mortals shouldn’t ask such questions of him.

I’d be lying if I said I was wholly convinced by any of these arguments.

1) In the case of Neva Rogers I mentioned earlier, being rewarded eventually isn’t much consolation when you have begged for mercy from God and then been shot in the face.
2) In that case, the basis for morality goes out the window. Why be good if you stand just as much chance of being smote as someone who is bad?
3) I find it difficult to see who else’s needs were satisfied when Neva Rogers was killed.
4) Get out clause.

None of this appears to address why some people think they have had their prayers answered by God when they find Jesus’ face in a tortilla, but fail to see that the prayers of millions of people EVERY DAY in far more deserving circumstances go unanswered.