As an ex-JW who is a pagan and a natural philosopher, I cannot deny the influence of pagan religion on the early Christian faith (and in later times!), resulting in the Trinity doctrine.
It (the evidence/proof/etc.) is all there.
I hate the Watchtower but I really still hate the Trinity Jesus is NOT God!
by Witness 007 343 Replies latest jw experiences
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Octarine Prince
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Witness 007
Sorry I cant spell Tennassee.......double nn ee ss I also cant say or spell Massatussutes the other state!......but dont get me off topic...these hard to spell states are like the Trinity......confusing.
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WTWizard
Here is one solution to this dilemma. Suppose Jesus was talking to a people that could not think for themselves, and the religious authorities were preventing them from learning. He invented the concept of God to help them out of that mess, and effectively personified himself as that God. And, the real meaning is that Jesus was his own God, and each person could learn to be their own Gods, too.
However, the religious authorities were stopping that from happening. The solution was that obeying God; that is, the inner God that thinks independently; was more important than obeying those oppressive leaders. This would have allowed the apostles to think on their own, which was Jesus' real message. To get started, Jesus would be their God. If they follow their Lord Jesus, eventually they would become just like him and think on their own. They would, in effect, become their own Gods.
To that effect, Jesus and God were actually one and the same person. The Holy Ghost would be the helper--that is, if they continued to follow their Lord Jesus straight to freedom of thought and Godship. Now, you have your Trinity--and it makes perfect sense once demystified from the Catholic Church, which tampered with Jesus' teachings for their own agenda. Note that the Watchtower Society has further tampered with Jesus' teachings, misleading people to follow Jesus exactly (not his true message) or to follow the Filthful and Disgraceful Slavebugger exactly (also not his true teachings).
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zeroday
Zeroday from Tennasse our Aussie cowboys could whip your USA cowboys butts
No doubt...we had real cowboys once OH about 100 years ago give it time you'll catch up...
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BurnTheShips
three seperate beings who are just ONE person really.....yeah, easy to understand!...God sent himself to die as his son....while he watched on in heaven...and was dead for three days but was alive in heaven during that time.......??????????????????
It IS difficult to understand. But it is not three seperate beings in one person. It is three persons in one being. The Bible says Jesus was begotten not created. Man begets man. When he creates something, it is something lesser than himself, than man. God begot Jesus.....
Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
Chapter 24
The last chapter was about the difference between begetting and making. A man begets a child, but he only makes a statue. God begets Christ but He only makes men. But by saying that, I have illustrated only one point about God, namely, that what God the Father begets is God, something of the same kind as Himself. In that way it is like a human father begetting a human son. But not quite like it. So I must try to explain a little more..........................
You know that in space you can move in three ways - to left or right, backwards or forwards, up or down. Every direction is either one of these three or a compromise between them. They are called the three Dimensions. Now notice :his. If you are using only one dimension, you could draw only a straight line. If you are using two; you could draw a figure: say, a square. And a square is made up of four straight lines. Now a step further. If you have three dimensions, you can then build what we call a solid body: say, a cube - a thing like a dice or a lump of sugar. And a cube is made up of six squares.
Do you see the point? A world of one dimension would be a straight line. In a two-dimensional world, you still get straight lines, but many lines make one figure. In a three-dimensional world, you still get figures but many figures make one solid body. In other words, as you advance to more real and more complicated levels, you do not leave behind you the things you found on the simpler levels: you still have them, but combined in new ways - in ways you could not imagine if you knew only the simpler levels.
Now the Christian account of God involves just the same principle. The human level is a simple and rather empty level. On the human level one person is one being, and any two persons are two separate beings - just as, in two dimensions (say on a flat sheet of paper) one square is one figure, and any two squares are two separate figures. On the Divine level you still find personalities; but up there you find them combined in new ways which we, who do not live on that level, cannot imagine. In God's dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube. Of course we cannot fully conceive a Being like that: just as, if we were so made that we perceived only two dimensions in space we could never properly imagine a cube. But we can get a sort of faint notion of it. And when we do, we are then, for the first time in our lives, getting some positive idea, however faint, of something super-personal - something more than a person.
Personally, that is the best explanation I have found to date. I wrestled and rejected the Trinity for years, and that was the final straw that pushed me over to a Trinitarian understanding.
I HATED the Trinity
Burn
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real one
Thanks Burn!
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real one
it seems sometimes that we believe what we want to believe or what sounds good but when it comes to God we must uderstand or try to understand that He is more complicated than we think. The jw have Him pegged or so they think but He is so much more than who they make Him out to be!
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real one
I love this forum!
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DanTheMan
"jesus is not God" - I think you need to go a little further and ask if concepts such as the Trinity have any link to that which exists outside the human mind.
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zeroday
I love this forum!
Ofcourse you do because it's so easy to ignore arguements you can not counter like my John 20:17 scripture...