The Holy Trinity

[Bryn]

So, how was this 'ere Trinity created outa nothin'? Can't get 'ead roun' that one.

[Miles Coverdale]

I don't know VC I found them infinitely more believable than scientists trying to get me to accept that something was created from nothing.

VCC

Have you been at the Ray Comfort videos?

[Serial_Apologist]

So, how was this 'ere Trinity created outa nothin'? Can't get 'ead roun' that one.

By seeing "something" and "nothing" as relative, interdependent opposites within the realm of thought: useful and bearing a similar relationship to "..." as a map does to a landscape, a Zen Buddhist (or Cornelius Cardew at a certain stage in his life) would probably say.

[Serial_Apologist]

How do you define "created" in this context?

Yes one asks this of theologians of the broadly-speaking Judaeo-Christian lineage who hold to the building blocks theory of creation later embraced by Newton. More eastern spiritual traditions such as Hinduism and Taoism hold to an idea of spontaneous growth from as-it-were within interactive processes, without need of outside agency - rather as in Lovelock's "Gaia theory".

[Bryn]

By seeing "something" and "nothing" as relative, interdependent opposites within the realm of thought: useful and bearing a similar relationship to " " as a map does to a landscape, a Zen Buddhist (or Cornelius Cardew at a certain stage in his life) would probably say.

Ah, so produced by the internal workings of a living neural network, thus emerging way, way after the Big Bang and all that did not precede it.

[Serial_Apologist]

Ah, so produced by the internal workings of a living neural network, thus emerging way, way after the Big Bang and all that did not precede it.

There is a tradition that the Buddha compared questions about origination with a person shot through with an arrow refusing to have it removed until s/he knows every detail there is to be known about his/her assailant: age, gender, place of birth, religious persuasion if any, etc., if you see what I mean.

[Bryn]

There is a tradition that the Buddha compared questions about origination with a person shot through with an arrow refusing to have it removed until s/he knows every detail there is to be known about his/her assailant: age, gender, place of birth, religious persuasion if any, etc., if you see what I mean.

My use of the word "emerging" was by no means accidental. I am of the viewpoint that all religion was/is emergent rather than immanent.

[Serial_Apologist]

My use of the word "emerging" was by no means accidental. I am of the viewpoint that all religion was/is emergent rather than immanent.

Yeas, if I understand that to mean evolutionarily; insofar as I understand them (or some of them) Buddhists see Mind as co-extensive, an aspect (or part of the generating energy of) an organismic/environmental unity. They think of us and it as mutually coextensive, with moral and ethical behaviour stemming ultimately from that realisation, (mythologies, like Father Christmas, being a temporary pedagogical gambit for inculcating social values, the map, into the young), and it is only thinking, or the separative condition of language (some more than others) that thinks of us as apart from, as opposed to a part of.

[Bryn]

Yeas, if I understand that to mean evolutionarily; insofar as I understand them (or some of them) Buddhists see Mind as co-extensive, an aspect (or part of the generating energy of) an organismic/environmental unity. They think of us and it as mutually coextensive, with moral and ethical behaviour stemming ultimately from that realisation, (mythologies, like Father Christmas, being a temporary pedagogical gambit for inculcating social values, the map, into the young), and it is only thinking, or the separative condition of language (some more than others) that thinks of us as apart from, as opposed to a part of.

Close enough.

[Serial_Apologist]

Close enough.

I wonder what others on here think? Usually when I try and broach this the board goes silent, as if the subject's too sensitive to discuss or I'm not putting myself across clearly enough. For me these ideas are more than merely academic or theoretical, and always to be seen as part of the personal being the political equation much spoken of in the 1970s if not acted upon. I thought for want of a better definition the hippy/yippies, inner-versus-outer change dichotomy that quickly followed 1968 was a tragedy, and led to politics being a dry theoretically-based pursuit led by ofttimes puritans and would-be authoritarians, and the "spiritual" (hate the word!) becoming co-opted into what became New Age global business individualist lifestyle making. Which is maybe why I tend to support Greens these days - avoiding the puritan refugees therein!

[Vile Consort]

I used to understand particle physics and general relativity well enough to solve some of the equations and thereby get a maths degree.

Whatever it is that S-A is on about is totally incomprehensible to me. That's why I remain silent.

[Serial_Apologist]

Whatever it is that S-A is on about is totally incomprehensible to me. That's why I remain silent.

I sometimes wonder myself, too, VC.

[Gordon]

Re: ##25-27 I don't get what S-A's trying to say eitehr!! Perhaps I share with VC a science/maths background and so am failing to grasp the point[s]?

Just out of interest: Oppenheimer chose the name "Trinity" for the bomb's test site in the desert. That's where his interest in Eastern religions led him to make his famed statement after the explosion - "now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds". Science meets Philosophy.

[Alison]

I hope Mr Ardcarp is now happy having heard from a variety of non-theologians.

[Vile Consort]

I have tried to "do" religion. But I feel people who have faith have a sixth sense that I don't have - as If I was born without the organ needed to apprehend that sense. Like someone deaf from birth trying to understand other people discussing music.

I love liturgy. I can be deeply moved by it and by people's prayer requests - by their plight, their distress and their helplessness in the face of loss, illness, death and the thousand ills that befall mankind. I embarrassed myself at evensong in St Albans Abbey some years ago by being a sobbing wreck listening to Howells' Collegium Regale after reading some particularly poignant petitions on the prayer board.

But God and Father Christmas are very much the same substance in my mind. And I simply don't understand what is meant by the word "spiritual".

It's just blindingly obvious to me that religions are a load of tosh made up by slightly unhinged people. This week's IOT only served to strengthen that belief.

I wonder if there's an IOT to be done on the history of atheism?