I’m back from the dentist, and all is well. I even had a doughnut to celebrate. Now we have today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “obtuse”. It’s about the Trinity, an concept that I have yet to grasp despite having imbibed a pretty stiff dose of Sophisticated Theology®.
As for who the “she” refers to, I suspect it’s the barmaid. What Mo doesn’t realize is that the Trinity resembles Certs Breath Mints: “It’s three, three—three gods in one!”
Ho-ho! Showing your age with that Certs commercial line – who remembers that? (I do.)
So many g*ds and so little time.
By the way, speaking of another subject, A 6 part documentary called, The Origins Of Hate, will be shown on the Discovery Channel starting October 13th at 10 o’clock eastern. Steven Spielberg is very much involved in this one. Not sure if it is a once a week or how they are doing it. Start the DVR
After we settle which one god, then we can move onto whose story about that god. Pretty soon there’ll be only one human left, at most. Voila! Peace at last.
Well… Ozone molecule is made up of 3 Oxygen atoms! Glucose molecule is made up of C6H12O6 — 3 different types of atoms! Examples of 3 in 1: 3 Atoms in 1 Molecule. 🙂
No, not certs, its all one substance.
Probably more like Sybil or Eve, one substance, three personas.
Really, its an adaptation of Plotinus’s One, Intellect and Soul, representing three forms of unity (pure unity, unity of a continuum – corresponding to consciousness, and unity of a plurality – or the world soul for the Hegelian).
Of course, straight up Plotinus leads to the Arian heresy, so its an non-hierarchical version of Plotinus. But your discerning Neo-Platonists (like Newton) were heretics for this reason.
The real problem is that Jesus was embodied, and the Holy Spirit was embodied in the Church (but not really an agent in the same way), but the Father obviously was the Creator, so Jesus couldn’t be equated with the Father, and the Church couldn’t be equated with Jesus. . . combined with the requirement that the number of Gods could not exceed one, and the aspects could not be “more divine” than the other aspects. Its the fundamental conceptual problem with postulating an incarnate Supreme Being.
Its kind of like intersectionality, every sacred being is oppressed, you’re not supposed to say one group is more oppressed/sacred than the other, but everyone is different but the same through sacralizing power of oppression/white supremacy. Again, its the theological problem of an incarnate Supreme Being. Some things just take a committee to parse out, but you’ll see, intersectionality will wind up dovetailing with liberation theology, because its just pseudo-Christian pseudo-Marxism repackaged for a secular age.
On the atheist reductionist front, it bears noticing that wherever you find a hierarchy, you find evidence of the divine. (I don’t mean evidence for the existence of God, I mean you find people committed to a common ideal, a higher good, and a god, of course, is an ideal with a face and a purported lineage, essentially idealism for the mass market.)
The hierarchy is to say this is better than that in that its more pure or just or beautiful or truthful or clear. It’s closer to God, so to speak. Evolution is true, ID is not true, you are positing a hierarchical relationship between two sets of ideas.
Since any “real” hierarchy is a set of relationships between things, and reductionism denies the existence of the reality of relationships between things (because then the whole could not be reduced to the parts), you lose any way to conceptualize hierarchy. In this sense, it is a tool for de-sacralization of the world.
But in reality, the world of human experience is loaded with hierarchies and competing hierarchies, whether they are socially constructed or natural or illusions or whatever. If you want to spot the religion, identify the hierarchy.
Fascinating response I’ll come back to this I want to know more about identifying the religious psychology through hierarchies
In a hierarchy, there is always going to be an authority figure or group of authority figures you can’t question. [You can figure this out by asking–what if I say “no” to this person or I contradict the narrative, what happens?]
. . and then there is the mission. . .
Heck, even a corporation that exists to make a buck will pay a consultant to invent a mission statement about how they are trying to create “value added” to their clients or something.
You need to inspire (interesting word) people that they are achieving something collectively great, admirable, fantastic through their crappy everyday work–whether your running a religion, an army, a state, or a company. That’s elan, spirit, morale you know, in the non-New Age sense, and organizations with real elan have a serious competitive edge.
I once patronized some retail outlet – they had a ‘Mission Statement’ posted up prominently on the wall. I didn’t go back. If they’re making enough excess profit to indulge in that sort of pretentious corporate BS I’ll patronize someone with more sense and lower profit margins.
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My theory is the Church decided on a trinity just to make it seem more mysterious. Or, they just couldn’t settle on one so they compromised to move the meeting along. Or, they had sub-cults devoted to one or another of the three, so they compromised to avoid violence. Otherwise, I don’t know what they could have been thinking.
Jerry, you are a Trinity: a retired biology professor, the host of one of the most interesting websites, and an ailurophile, and the three are one.
See? Easy peasy.
Trinity? He’s, uh, whatever the word is for Four-In-One. He’s a duckophile, too, y’know!
🙂
Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper?
I heard they caught the last train for the coast… 😉
Trinity is acorporeal in that there is no biological generation (sex) and therefore no degeneration. The father and son are conflated (two generations are conflated). There are many virginal births in religion – see, M Shermer, Hitchens, Norman O Brown, Corliss Lamont, and of course Ernest Becker. It is also a ghost story. Such tales of death often include ghosts. This (holy) ghost can serve in this **immortality ideology**: perhaps as a mechanism between the two generations.
To repeat. The trinity is at its core a simple immortality ideology.
Finally, someone recognized I’m God. I’ve been been saying it for long enough.
Thanks! So is evolution true? And do we have free will?
Holy Ghost is another name for a rock band
Similar to your Certs metaphor, in The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter draws an analogy between the trinity and Three-in-One oil.