Nothing in God's late condemnation of Saul suggests the misrepresentation thesis. — Count Timothy von Icarus
I remember the writing in bSamuel as brilliant and capturing what can happen even when legitimate prophecy is granted to the crooked timber of humanity.
...
In Torah, you'll hear, e.g., "And God said to Abraham...." In the book of Samuel, this doesn't happen, and instead, it's Samuel telling Saul to put Amalek under the ban. The key here is Samuel. He could be correctly and perfectly conveying God's will, or he could be mistaken, or he could be deceiving. The clarity of Torah, where we see God's words openly dictated, is no longer present in Samuel. — BitconnectCarlos
I continue to be impressed by the amount of gymnastics — jorndoe
Dude, — Banno
On your reasoning, we can disprove the thesis simply by noting that Superman wears a cape whereas Kent does not. Therefore they are not equal or identical. — Leontiskos
Consider two biconditionals:
SC: The two terms can be substituted salva veritate within this context ↔ The two terms are equivalent within this context
SA: The two terms can be substituted salva veritate in every context ↔ The two terms are equivalent in every context (i.e. the two terms are absolutely identical)
Both of these biconditionals are true, but this is the argumentation that leverages SA:
i. [Claim that two terms can be substituted in every context]
ii. [Identify a context in which the two terms cannot be substituted]
iii. Draw a reductio of some kind
For example:
1. "Superman" = "Clark Kent."
2. Lois believes that Superman can fly.
3. ∴ Lois believes that Clark Kent can fly.
As I pointed out above, (1) is false, but it is false in a very deep sense. This is because SA is a linguistic impossibility, and therefore to stipulate that some pair of terms satisfies SA is to stipulate a linguistic impossibility. It’s therefore no surprise that one can always find a context in which the two terms cannot be substituted once one moves out into the real world. — Leontiskos
I apologize: I was not understanding you before. I thought you were referring to demonic possession. Indeed, I agree that it is much more questionable if demonic hybrids would have rights. — Bob Ross
Could God wipe them out justly? I don’t know, but it would definitely violate the rationale I gave above for rights. — Bob Ross
And behold, they cried out, “What have you to do with us, O Son of God? Have you come here to torment us before the time?” — Matthew 8:29 (RSV)
Yes, but no one that objects with those to me (so far) has ever coherently defined what ‘murder’ is. Like I said, that view may be internally coherent in some theory; but it isn’t coherent with the idea of rights I expounded above. Do you have a different definition of murder that you prefer such that God and the Angel of Death are not committing murder?
My definition, to recap, is that murder is the direct intentional killing of a person. — Bob Ross
Interesting. It seems like Fr. Stephen is taking a more spiritual approach to the theology and the Bible (going back to the beginning of our conversation). — Bob Ross
His critique is fair insofar that systematizing is can go too far and systematize for the sole sake of doing so (e.g., Kant); but I wonder how valid this critique really is: he seems to just have given up on striving towards perfect knowledge. It seems like systematic knowledge is just the attempt at, or aspiration towards, complete knowledge. Should we really give that up? What do we have left after doing so? — Bob Ross
That must mean there is something objective and particular about the concept of the Trinity — Fire Ologist
Wholly instrumental analytic reason is in a sense diabolical (in both its original and current sense). — Count Timothy von Icarus
Let's just leave it at this: on it's face, the Catholic Trinity appears to be contradictory. — frank
As a result, the base-model has the latent ability to express any of the wide range of intelligible opinions that an author of some piece of the training data might have produced, and has no proclivity to adjudicate between them. — Pierre-Normand
During post-training, the model's weights are reconfigured through reinforcement learning in order to fit the schema USER: <query>, ASSISTANT: <response>, USER: <follow up question>, etc. and the models responses that are deemed best in accordance with predetermined criteria (usefulness, harmlessness, accuracy, etc.) are reinforced by human evaluators of by a reward model trained by human evaluators. Some political biases may arise from this process rather than from the consensual or majority opinions present in the training data. But it is also a process by means of which the opinions expressed by the model come to be pegged rather closely to the inferred opinions of the user just because such responses tend to be deemed by evaluators to be more useful or accurate. (Some degree of reward-hacking sometimes is going on at this stage). — Pierre-Normand
It's more akin to a rational reconstruction of the opinions that the model has learned to produce under the constraints that this response would likely be deemed by the user to be useful, cogent and accurate. Actual cogency and accuracy are achieved with some reliability when, as often is the case, the most plausible sounding answer (as the specific user would evaluate it) is the most plausible answer. — Pierre-Normand
Googling "God: Multiple persons sharing one being" returns the Trinity. — Banno
↪frank But I think what I've said in the above posts acknowledges all of that. I said:
So two men both 'participate' in the form 'man' even though they are numerically different men. — Wayfarer
The danger for the Catholic is polytheism. — Banno
When Catholics say the Father is God, they are not predicating. They aren't saying God is a category the Father belongs to. It's an identity statement. The Father is not a section of God. The Father is fully God. Whatever God is, the Father is equal to that. — frank
Christianity is the most ideologically dynamic of all the global religions because it's a fusion of several different sets of cultural outlooks and values. — frank
Kastrup uses this as a metaphor for the relationship between individual minds and what he calls “mind at large.” Just as each dissociated identity experiences itself as a separate person, we experience ourselves as separate individuals—when, in his view, we are all expressions of the same underlying mind manifesting in different ways. — Wayfarer
"=" is very well defined in both maths and logic — Banno
Analytics like Banno seldom have any idea what they are doing when they say, "x = y," as they assume that anything can be placed into that form. They don't recognize the mathematical context and the single genus of the relata that their formulation takes for granted. — Leontiskos
That conclusion (not premise) could only be made by someone who knew both the differences and sameness between what is a “Clark” and what is a “Superman”. — Fire Ologist
P1: X = Y
P2: Z is ready enough to say "X can fly."
P3: Therefore, Z is ready enough to say "Y can fly."
I don’t think this apparent controversy is about an apparent flaw in the notion “X = Y”, but from the insertion of the “Z is ready to say that…”. Z’s belief creates a new context in which we must redefine X and Y. So we can’t substitute the use of either X or Y from P1, in any sentence following P2; P2 has redefined X and Y according to Z’s belief. — Fire Ologist
How did I end up analogizing the Trinity to a single human person, and it jibes with Aquinas, but I didn’t go to Aquinas? Incoherence in the notion of a ‘Trinity’ would make this an utter accident. — Fire Ologist
'Essence' is 'what is essential to the being', from the Latin 'esse' 'to be'. So two men both 'participate' in the form 'man' even though they are numerically different men. — Wayfarer
1. "Superman" = "Clark Kent."
2. Lois believes that Superman can fly.
3. ∴ Lois believes that Clark Kent can fly.
In this case, “is” doesn’t mean numerical identity (as in "Clark Kent is Superman") but rather participation in a common essence. — Wayfarer
The abstract of your article contains such outrageous grammatical errors that I am inclined to suspect either that it was written by rather poor AI, or that you are only semi-literate. — alan1000
The second problem is that to read the article, I have to sign on to a website, with the obvious security compromise which that entails. — alan1000
Owing to the way they've been post-trained, all LLMs are largely unable to offer political opinions of their own. — Pierre-Normand
T1 has to show up in the b sentence, and it's not there. There's nothing to substitute. — frank
It is reasonable to think that the relationship between L and some other category W that represents an alternative analytic conception of the world, can be described in terms of a functor F : L --> W. — sime
They believed God is everything. — frank
In the sense that God is everything - God is the “in” and “with” of all things.
But in the sense that each separate thing is separate from each other (like this rock and that drink), each separate thing is not God and God is not that thing. — Fire Ologist
So now here’s the analytic side of it. Leontiskos does the above make sense to you? It’s not expressly dogma, or from someone else - just my attempt to speak about the Trinity and how is see it. Where is there blatant error and where is it correct?
I think you, @Leontiskos can check my math and see coherence with the basic doctrines in some of the above, see the logic of it. — Fire Ologist
(And you made a distinction between God as a category of being and God as the living being we know as God. And you talked of “the God” versus “God”. These are all necessary distinctions, but I think it can confuse this further. Meaning, I follow you, but I could see someone misconstruing that you are saying there is more than one God.). — Fire Ologist
What is a person? — Fire Ologist
Fine. The use of Logos tells that it's related to Plato, the Stoics, and Philo. The basic idea was that God is everything. That's what Plotinus believed. I'm happy to give you the victory over sorting out what Catholics believe. — frank
The basic idea was that God is everything. — frank
Fine. You're saying John 1:1 is saying that the Word was with the Father, and the Word was divine. — frank
262 The Incarnation of God's Son reveals that God is the eternal Father and that the Son is consubstantial with the Father, which means that, in the Father and with the Father the Son is one and the same God. — Catechism of the Catholic Church, #262
I cannot come to know any person by reason alone. Not you, not Banno, not my children. I cannot come to know many things by reason alone. — Fire Ologist
That does an injustice to the Trinity. The mystery of knowing the Trinity is not akin to the mystery of truly knowing the nuances of me, Banno, or a fine wine.
We don't have official declarations that we can't know each other. The Trinity is not just a routine complicated thing. — Hanover
236 The Fathers of the Church distinguish between theology (theologia) and economy (oikonomia). "Theology" refers to the mystery of God's inmost life within the Blessed Trinity and "economy" to all the works by which God reveals himself and communicates his life. Through the oikonomia the theologia is revealed to us; but conversely, the theologia illuminates the whole oikonomia. God's works reveal who he is in himself; the mystery of his inmost being enlightens our understanding of all his works. So it is, analogously, among human persons. A person discloses himself in his actions, and the better we know a person, the better we understand his actions.
237 The Trinity is a mystery of faith in the strict sense, one of the "mysteries that are hidden in God, which can never be known unless they are revealed by God".58 To be sure, God has left traces of his Trinitarian being in his work of creation and in his Revelation throughout the Old Testament. But his inmost Being as Holy Trinity is a mystery that is inaccessible to reason alone or even to Israel's faith before the Incarnation of God's Son and the sending of the Holy Spirit. — Catechism of the Catholic Church
98% of Christian denominations accept the Trinity from a doctrinal point of view, yet only 16% of Christians actually accept it. https://www.arizonachristian.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/AWVI-2025_03_Most-Americans-Reject-the-Trinity_FINAL_03_26_2025.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com
What this means is that there is a distinction between self avowing as a Christian and being a part of the institution of Christianity. Such is common among religions, particularly large ones. — Hanover
I have always thought Christians were polytheistic, not as a criticism, but just a fact, not having any reason to particularly care to save them from it. I found Mormon belief clearer and just more forthright, but, again, there were no consequences for my view. I might as well have been studying the Greek gods. — Hanover
My point here is that I can fully understand preposterous views, like a snake talking to Eve, but you're arguing from incoheremce. While you may say it all makes sense if you think about it long enough, it really doesn't. — Hanover
This is the official view of the Catholic Church:
"The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of Christian faith and life. It is the mystery of God in himself. It is therefore the source of all the other mysteries of faith…” (CCC §234)
“The Trinity is a mystery of faith in the strict sense… We cannot come to know the Trinity by reason alone.” (CCC §237)
This is a direct nod to mysticism. While you might use reason to get at it somewhat, ultimately it's "a mystery." — Hanover
I do note in the Creed that it refers to "we," which could simply mean human reason cannot be used as a basis to understand the Trinity, and it would follow also that it can't be used to reject the Trinity. We can neither come up with reasons to prove it exists or that it doesn't, but we accept on faith that it does. — Hanover
If Christian, confirmation bias is dogmaticaly imposed and it eliminates the possibility of disproof and it entails belief regardless. You can understand then the feeling that there is no value in the debate. Your mind can't be changed by operation of law, so to speak. — Hanover
You're therefore not in a battle with the analytics or the users of reason. You're in a battle specifically with non-Christians who reject your demand of acceptance of Church dogma and refuse to humbly accept their human rationality cannot comprehend divine rationality. — Hanover
This therefore has nothing to do with secularism versus theism or analytics versus whatever. This is just whether one is willing to be Christian or not. If true Christians tied to doctrinal belief (98%) constitute the authentic Christians, then this is just about being Christian or not, and not about being an Analytic, a rationalist, a theist, or whatever. — Hanover
My belief holds, for example, that death is mourned because the opportunity to perform God's law has ended. Heaven, in all its glory, is not sought after, but is brought to earth by good acts. We seek to bring God here, not to go to the heavens for God. It's a this worldly religion based upon what you do. It's not a religion centered around eternal rewards.
My point is that you probably find that profoundly wrong, and you may find issues within it unresolvable, but why should I pretend to care. I don't hold my views because they are logically consistent, empirically provable, or factually credible. I hold them for meaning, purpose, comfort, morality, sense of community, sense of beauty, utilitarian benefit, belonging, etc etc. — Hanover
I guess I'm asking, why the grappling in the muck with the non-believers when you've got enough reason to believe even if some of their academic objections can't be readily overcome? — Hanover
– If the prayer is directed to the Father: "Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever";
– If it is directed to the Father, but the Son is mentioned at the end: "Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever";
– If it is directed to the Son: "Who live and reign with God the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever." — Roman Missal, Third Edition
Grant your faithful, we pray, almighty God,
the resolve to run forth to meet your Christ
with righteous deeds at his coming,
so that, gathered at his right hand,
they may be worthy to possess the heavenly Kingdom.
Through our lord Jesus Christ, your son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the holy spirit,
one God, for ever and ever. — Roman Missal, Third Edition
Well, I know what I mean... Ands the thread is pretty much about trying to make sense of what you mean. — Banno
Again, basing the entire discussion on a heuristic diagram which is famous for its oversimplification is not a good approach. Here is a clause from the Catechism of the Catholic Church that most closely approximates the same idea:
262 The Incarnation of God's Son reveals that God is the eternal Father and that the Son is consubstantial with the Father, which means that, in the Father and with the Father the Son is one and the same God.
— Catechism of the Catholic Church, #262
We could disambiguate the modern phrase, "The Son is God":
A. "The Son—in the Father and Spirit and with the Father and Spirit—is God"
B. "The Son—apart from the Father and the Spirit—is God"
(A) is theologically true whereas (B) is theologically false. The Son is never apart from the Father and the Spirit. What is happening in this thread is that (B) is being claimed as Catholic teaching, and this is false given that (B) is not Catholic teaching. (B) is a hostile translation of a highly compacted and oversimplified diagram.* In the contemporary colloquial idiom when Catholics speak of "God" as a sort of proper name they are talking about the Triune communion of persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. For Catholics the inner life of God is tri-personal, and this creates friction with the standard account of 'God' as mono-personal. The hostile translation (B) is presupposing 'God' as a mono-personal hypostasis, which would place the relata into the same genus and accord with a transitive property of identity. But anyone with knowledge of historic Christianity will know that this is a misrepresentation, that for Christians the generic "God" is triune rather than a single hypostasis, and that "Son" and "God" therefore belong to different genera. ↪Bob Ross was correct in saying that what is at stake is a predication rather than an identity relation. That is a remarkably accurate interpretation of Nicene Christianity. — Leontiskos
That's the reasoning behind the substitution argument given earlier. If in "Jesus is God" and "The Holy Spirit is God" the "is" is that of identity, then we ought be able to substitute and get "Jesus is the Holy Spirit". But Scripture won't let us. — Banno
The underlying idea that, "'Son' and 'God' are formally substitutable terms," requires an insane ignorance of Christian Trinitarianism. — Leontiskos
Are you now denying that Jesus is God? — Banno
In syllogistic logic, all relations are reduced to single-places predications. “Socrates is taller than Plato” have to be paraphrased into one-place predicates like “Socrates is-a-thing-taller-than-Plato” before entering a syllogism. Something like "Tully is Cicero" has to be treated not as a relation, but as a single-placed predicate. It has to be treated the same way as, say, "Tully is a writer". Tully is a member of the group of writers, and Tully is a member of the group of things which are Cicero. — Banno
The source was openly an LDS source, That's why frank provided the picture of the Mormons on bikes. @Banno then cited another article describing other views on the Trinity. The point then was just to point out there wasn't Christian consensus on the Trinity. — Hanover
Thus approximately 98.5%[59] of the world's Christians are Nicene Christians, adhering to the Nicene Creed's Trinitarian and Christological doctrines. The remaining 1.5% include non-Trinitarian groups such as the LDS Church, Jehovah's Witnesses, Swedenborgians, etc. — Nicene Creed | Wikipedia
The trinity is three entirely seperate personages, not a single entity. They have a common purpose, and they're referred to as the godhead. Such is true Christian theology. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/comeuntochrist/article/do-latter-day-saints-believe-in-the-trinity
When you say "the Christian narrative" and then start going on about the Nicene Creed which was arrived at 325 years after Jesus' death, you're just taking about your peculiar brand of modified Christianity. — Hanover
Like many Christians, we believe in God the Father, His Son Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. However, we don’t believe in the traditional concept of the Trinity. — Mormon Source
I think it struggles if it's subjected to basic logical demands (e.g., law of identity, law of non-contradiction, etc.). — Hanover
I don't know where [Hanover's] either/or is coming from. — Leontiskos
1. Yahweh is God. Jesus is God. The holy spirit is God.
2. . Hanover is a person, Bob is a person, Frank is a person.
3. Hanover is Banno. Bob is Banno. Frank is Banno.
Is 1 like 2 or is 1 like 3? Clear this up for me.
If 1 is like 2, then you have three things that fit into a single category.
If I is like 3, then you either have 1 person with 3 names or a 3 headed monster. — Hanover
262 The Incarnation of God's Son reveals that God is the eternal Father and that the Son is consubstantial with the Father, which means that, in the Father and with the Father the Son is one and the same God. — Catechism of the Catholic Church, #262
I think there is an explanation of the many instances of “is” in the Triune God. I can provide some of them. Count and Leon have provided some. — Fire Ologist
The presupposition when using the transitive property of identity is that each of the relata are the same kind of thing (i.e. belong to the same genus). So if A, B, and C are all numbers, then we can apply the transitive property of identity to them. But if A is a number, B is an animal, and C is a solar system, then we cannot. — Leontiskos
It's "one nature, three persons." Consider the analogous case of human nature:
Mark is human. (A is B)
Christ is human. (C is B)
Therefore Mark is Christ. (A is C) — Count Timothy von Icarus
I fed the last page into Claude and received the following review: — Banno
AI
AI LLMs are not to be used to write posts either in full or in part (unless there is some obvious reason to do so, e.g. an LLM discussion thread where use is explicitly declared). Those suspected of breaking this rule will receive a warning and potentially a ban.
AI LLMs may be used to proofread pre-written posts, but if this results in you being suspected of using them to write posts, that is a risk you run. We recommend that you do not use them at all — Baden
↪Banno Then continue your conversation with ChatGPT and ask it for Jewish interpretations that it stands for repudiation of human sacrifice and then have it compare that to your other post. Then argue with it and have it change its mind.
It has such poor resolve I find — Hanover
Leontiskos's suggestion that analytic philosophy is overly restrictive when evaluating the Trinity because it demands logic is difficult to accept, — Hanover
The Analytic, with his tiny set of norms, must ultimately admit that pretty much everything passes muster, at least on Analytic grounds. — Leontiskos
To the extent we're referencing the analytic tradition as elaborated by Wittgenstein and Davidson, particularly with their dispensing with the idea that meaning is based on an internal referent, I see Leon's point. If the soul is an entity and the love one has for God is a true thing in one's heart, it's entirely inadequate to suggest these words refer to just their use and not some mystical entity.
And we've got to keep in mind that the linchpin of Wittgenstein's enterprise is in denying private language, which is a metaphysical impossibility to the theist because his internal state is publicly shared by God. That is,a theist might see Wittgenstein's theory as a brilliant reductio that proves without God you are limited to an absurdly restricted system of language. Of course, the secular analytic embraces this conclusion and runs with it. — Hanover
But then I disagree with Leon in his hesitation to accept that logical thought (which here I mean logical reasoning, which includes analogizing and the use of precedent as authority) by itself is not a religious act. — Hanover