If God had not rested on sunday then we would probably have never been given a day off from work during the week.
Like, wow, you have like enlightened me…
Let’s take a stand against stupidity, thirst, and do something interesting with this thread. Hit me. Anything. Well, anything religious.
We could talk about the nature of a triune god…
I haven’t discussed that in years and years.
What are your thoughts? Have you explored the theology?
-Thirst
I have a passing familiarity… 
I have to say, I'm not convinced of the underlying reasons why I must be a trinitarian to be a Christian- it doesn't seem terribly important to other Christian doctrine, it doesn't seem crucial to the way I think of theism philosophically. But it does seem pretty key. I, too, would like to see the reasoning behind it.
Though, the notion of God existing in part as an enternal Relationship does fit well with the wort of universe He made.
How much do you use the bible in your philosophical perspective of god?
-Thirst
Quite a bit, especially recently. I used to be a generic theist, who felt the trappings of the Bible were a pain in the ass that had to be justified or apologized for to make them fit with a philosophical take. Recently, however, I’ve been seeing the explanatory power of the dirty details of the Scriptures, and actually find the God of the Bible more plausible than a generic Philosopher’s God.
So, is the bible just a testament written by witnesses or is it inspired by god?
-Thirst
He’s certainly more interesting, for good or for bad…
At the very least, it’s an account of some stuff that God did in the world. So, for example, the stuff Jesus said was inspired by God because it was God that said those things. Is the rest God-inspired or just good philosophy? Neither would surprise me in the end I suppose.
Father/son/holy ghost, mind/body/spirit? Which is the chicken, and which the egg?
Well, the Jews didn’t believe in either.
Can Mind/Body/Spirit be traced to the pre-Christian Greeks?
A triune God, Id, Ego, and Superego.
Ucci - read Phaedo. The greeks got as far as dualism, but this included some confusion between mind and soul, due to the influence of the Pre-Socratic “naturalists”.
Yeah, my suspicion was that Mind =/ Body came first, and then Mind =/ Soul came along somewhat later and more imprecisely. So, did Christians see themselves as beings in three parts before they started seeing God that way?
Mind/body seems to have come along with soul/body, but the Presocratic version of the soul is not quite the Christian one, and tends to be explained “naturalistically”, but when you got guys telling you that everything is water, and then some other guys telling you the soul is air, and…well - they were trying.
But, to answer your question, it’s hard to say. As written, the religious view came first, within the church, anyway. No direct analogy was stated, so far as I can remember. But I suspect that there is a psychological significance to the early Christian theology. That’s a habit of mine. The three elements were present by the time of Aristotle, which the early theologians (at the least the ones who prevailed) read.
Didn’t God rest on Saturday? Sunday is the first day of the week, not the last.
faust
It's irritating to me that so much of this seems to come down to an inside/outside 'do you believe it or not' position. On the one hand, someone feeling charitable could say that the idea of people having a soul, a mind, and a body was an important [i]discovery[/i] of the day, and that in light of that discovery, theologians explained God's coming to Earth while remaining in His Heaven using this discovery- being a Person, it made sense for Him to have a triune nature sort of like we do.
If someone wasn't feeling charitable, they could say that philosophers of the time liked thinking of people as being in threes, three was considered a holy number, so the Church made up the Trinity thing because it sounded cool.
Obviously I'm making the second option sound flip because I don't support it, that's my bias, but you see my point.
Either way, to return to Thirst's question, I've always seen the concept of the Trinity being an essentially man-made doctrine used to explain some aspects of the Scripture and God's relationship with man. If it turns out to be incorrect, that would be an example of human's imperfect knowledge appled to a perfect revelation- not a flaw in the revelation itself. I don't think mine is a mainstream view in this regard, though.
Jewish scripture counts it as Saturday - explaining the Sabbath. Christians count it as Sunday by the bible.
Well, Ucci, it sort of is an inside/outside thing. I cannot, myself, sensibly say “God says, in Exodus…” given my view. You and I could both say (I think) “the author(s) of Exodus…” All I can refer to is the historical record, which I actually knew pretty well, at one time, as I spent a lot of time studying Late Antiquity and the early medeival period - which is tantamount to studying the early history of the Christian Church. I wish I remembered it better.
Even so, I think it’s possible to say that early theologians discovered an apt exegesis of God, or that they disvovered a way in which God has revealed himself in a way that is understandable to humans.
Nah.
That’s what conversation is for. That’s what dialog is for.
Of course, some of the most important schisms of the early (and not so early) Church have been over just this issue. The Trinity has become mainstream, but it wasn’t always anything like certain that it would.
By the way, I wonder if there is a Unitarian church near you. I was a Unitarian for years, despite that I have always been an atheist. (This may puzzle those with no familiarity with Unitarianism.) My guess is that you would find it interesting.