The point of existence and how it refutes the Trinity

by slimboyfat 57 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  slimboyfat

  Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury gave an interesting answer to the somewhat stark question, what’s the point of us existing?

  He said:

  As a Christian, my starting point is that we exist because the most fundamental form of activity, energy, call it what you like, that is there, is love. That is, it’s a willingness that the other should be. The world exists because God desires that there be an other, and so love is fundamental to that.

  If bringing others into existence is an expression of love, then it makes sense that God loves his “so much” (John 3.16) as the first one he called into existence. God was alone and completely sufficient in himself, and he did not need any other person in order to make himself complete, but it was an active choice, prompted by love, that moved him to create other beings to share existence with. If God had always existed as three persons, as Trinitarians claim, then it was no choice, or expression of love, to share existence, but an eternal fact. The Trinity therefore undermines the initial act of love by God in sharing existence, first with his firstborn son, and then with the angels and humans.

  Rowan Williams’ comments are at 2.45 in this video

  https://youtu.be/9WnOYHi5k4g?si=uQ3POKRFTKgSzDx-
  
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  Phizzy

  Good thoughts here from the old Archbish. and yourself Slimboy.

  As a non-believer myself, I don't believe any gods ever existed, or ever will., these are mere questions of academic interest to me, but, I AM interested ! It is now a hobby of mine to study the development of ideas and of religions.

  I can see how the Trinity Doctrine came about, the basis for the thinking behind it is in Scripture, the Writer of the Gospel of John drew on the Hebrew Scriptures to formulate his ideas, and Greek Philosophy too somewhat.

  The Church would have been far better off had it not gone beyond what that Writer said !

  As is obvious, the Trinity Doctrine as it stands goes "beyond what is written" and is beyond Logic, and it is beyond Reality, as also are any ideas about gods being real.
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  Sea Breeze

  @SBF

  I don't believe the Trinity is refuted at all:

  God is love. Love can only be expressed in community. God is a communty of three persons in one substance. Therefore he is complete.

  God's nature requires him to be such that he is.

  To say there was a time God couldn't love and needed to create us in order to be complete, is to say he wasn't complete without us and therefore wasn't God at some point in the past.

  It suggest an upsidedown world. One where God needs us and not the other way around.
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  BoogerMan

  Revelation 14:1 - "Then I looked, and there before me was the Lamb, standing on Mount Zion, and with him 144,000 who had his [Jesus'] name and his Father’s name written on their foreheads."

  For Trinitarians: Can you spot (and explain) the glaring omission?

  Clue: The 3rd part of the mythical co-equal, co-eternal godhead is going to be really cheesed off at being downgraded - just like the alleged anti-typical "other sheep."

  Not good enough to have his name stamped on a few resurrected foreheads?

  Biblical formula: Every time God & Christ are mentioned in a Scripture, the holy spirit is M.I.A.
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  HereIam60

  I have no comment on The Triniry, but I liked that phrase "...a willingness that the other should be..." calls to mind 'live and let live', 'Do unto others as you would have then do unto you', 'God is Love'....I came to believe that He being complete in himself and happy wanted others to be as well Why that purpose was disrupted by confict and pain, I don't know, and can accept that perhaps we never will. But just to exist is, to use an overworked JW word "a privilege'. I do not defend the Watchtower errors, but it was through that group that I came to know God through His word and came to know the love that sets fear aside..
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  peacefulpete

  If God acted out of love by making 'others', did he lack love before?

  If there is nothing 'other' to perceive and compare, can a pre-manifest God be said to have perception?

  Did God have senses? What purpose did those senses serve prior to anything of which to sense? Did God then give himself senses so as to perceive his own creation and his superiority over it?

  Before anything was manifest and no 'other' to manifest to, did God's very existence have evidence?
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  Halcon

  I came to believe that He being complete in himself and happy wanted others to be as well. Why that purpose was disrupted by confict and pain, I don't know, and can accept that perhaps we never will.

  Because love, by definition, cannot be forced. The choice to reciprocate God's love is embedded.
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  slimboyfat

  God is sufficient in himself. He doesn't require another, but he chooses to create others as an expression of love, that's the point. If God had the experience of others regardless of his will then it couldn't be said to be a choice or an expression of love to share existence with others. Anything we say about God is obviously tentative, but among the things we can say it seems to make more sense that God shared existence by an active choice and that it was motivated by love. Asking if God had love before that doesn't seem like a defeater because it's not clear that "before" means anything to God if he created time at the creation. Or even if his expression of love was preceded by a period (if period means something here) of intention before action, that seems preferable to saying that God had no choice in the matter and was compelled to share existence as a necessary state of affairs.
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  Halcon

  Before anything was manifest and no 'other' to manifest to, did God's very existence have evidence?

  In other words, can God exist only in His own mind? Yes he can.
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  Touchofgrey

  Love was not the fundamental thing that caused our solar system to come into existence, but rather the collapse of a star ,a supernova which led to the evolution of our solar system including the earth some 4.6 billion years ago, then the bombardment of the earth with asteroids bringing water etc to the earth and then the earth went under a violent time with volcanoes and earthquakes and the movement of the tectonic plates.

  And even after that there has been 5 mass extinctions events the last one some 65 million years ago which wiped out the dinosaurs and almost all life forms.

  But thankfully life forms did survive and led to the evolution and humans.

  Love was not responsible for any of these things and neither was any of the 3 to 5 thousand major gods that were invented by humans ,not even the trinitys of god that existed before the Christian one evolved.