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At this point arguing Catholic theology feels like arguing Star Wars lore. It's fake. It doesn't have to make sense. It doesn't make sense. It was always fake, but now it's super doubleplus ultra fake. If you try to apply logic to it you will end up running in circles.
Yes, elements like the trinity in particular are some of the biggest historical examples of "point deer, make horse" style shit tests for making dissidents reveal themselves and getting others to show a token of submission to an authority over their own sense of reason.
Even from an atheist perspective, I feel like the Trinity is a weak example of that? The Trinity is a theological doctrine that doesn't directly contradict any experience of how the world works, and if it sounds strange or unintuitive, frankly it seems even more unintuitive that an infinite, all-powerful deity would have an innermost being exactly like or easily comprehensible to humans.
If I wanted to point to something empirically absurd, I would have thought the obvious candidates are things like transubstantiation or even the virgin birth - something that appears to plainly go against how we think the world works.
(Of course, it is perhaps relevant to say here that transubstantiation or the virgin birth didn't go against how ancient people thought the world worked, so they can't have been demanding believe in an absurdity as proof of loyalty. If they seem absurd now, that is surely more due to a changing weltanschaung around them. I doubt that the church at any point actually demanded belief in something that seems absurd as a loyalty test to weed out dissidents; that sounds to me like a post hoc rationalist attempt to make sense of something that probably just made sense to people at the time on its own terms.)
Errrr - I think you're skipping that part in the Gospel where, when Joseph finds out Mary is pregnant, he is going to quietly divorce her (so she won't be publicly stoned for adultery) until he gets the visit from the angel to say "no, she didn't sleep around on you, this is a miracle":
I didn't say that the virgin birth would have been seen as obviously true, in a way that admits of no possible doubt.
I said that it's not obviously absurd - not in the way that it might seem to someone with a contemporary scientific worldview. Miraculous births are conceivable (pun unintended) in an ancient Near Eastern worldview. Joseph doesn't object to the angel that what he's telling him is impossible, after all. He is surprised but accepts that this is something that God could in principle do.
Why would you say that someone with a contemporary scientific worldview would find it harder to believe in the virgin birth than Joseph did? What have we learned since then that makes it harder to believe? Surely knowing the mechanics of fertilization and early human development doesn't change the fact that people in those days knew just as well as we do that you don't get pregnant without a father involved.
In both cases believing in a miraculous birth is believing in supernatural intervention, violating the natural order. It should be just as easy or difficult to believe in any age. What have we learned since then that would change that?
I think the idea is that people in those times, especially pagans, saw supernatural forces as much more involved than people today do. The sun is Helios himself driving across the horizon, plagues or earthquakes were sent by God, the coin you put in a grave will be used to pay Charon etc. Given that context, a virgin birth doesn't violate nearly as many assumptions about how the world (usually) works as it would even for a typical contemporary theistic account of reality.
All of this is conflating two different meanings of "miracle".
In ancient world, there was distinction between 1/"paradoxon" - any strange and inexplicable thing or event and 2/"semeion" - sign or portent, that does not have to be extraordinary by itself, sent by god(s) or fate.
The difference is that semeion means something and the meaning is clear.
For example:
Lightning falling from a cloudless sky - paradoxon. It could be bad omen or warning, or Zeus could be just bored.
Ligtning falling during thunderstorm and exactly hitting notorious sinner's house - semeion. The meaning is clear: Repent and do not sin anymore.
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Supernatural forces being more involved than today might make it easier to believe that a miracle had occurred: it wouldn't change the fact that you would understand it to be a miracle. It's not like Joseph thought to himself "Well, I guess sometimes women can have babies without having sex with anyone." He knew just the same as we do that that sort of thing doesn't happen, and that if it does happen it would be a miracle. A virgin birth violates as many assumptions about how the world works back then as it does today: in both cases the only explanation for such a thing occurring would be a miracle (that is to say, a violation of the natural order by an outside force).
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Both Roman pagan Celsus and passages in the Jewish Talmud also claimed that Jesus was actually the product of adultery between Jesus' mother and a Roman soldier named Pantera. There was definitely skepticism by others about the virgin birth business.
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Maybe you don't really understand the doctine of the trinity? It's something that you can't logically explain or understand but you have to believe. I'm not even sure what it could mean to believe something you don't understand.
Any attempts at making it make logical sense have been declared heretical, for example:
I agree with you, it seems like even accepting the basic principles of Abrahamic religion regarding the power of God, Jesus’ existence as a human defies all explanation and any attempt to describe it in terms that make sense to humans are heretical. The point is that it doesn’t make sense, it’s not even like any of the above would make God less omniscient or omnipotent or the rest of it all, it’s almost like a game where you’re banned from rephrasing the question itself. It’s effectively prohibited to TRY to make sense of it.
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I'd like to hope that I understand it, considering that I have multiple degrees in theology and have done research projects applying a Trinitarian lens to a range of issues...
There's a sense in which I would say that I don't understand the Trinity. Like Augustine and the seashell, nobody fully understands it. But I hope that I understand it approximately as well as a human being can.
The third one is docetism, incidentally.
And in your opinion something nobody fully understands is less of a shit test than believing in perpetual virginity?
Sure. The idea that nobody would fully understand the nature of God is not a particularly shocking one - certainly both Jews and Muslims will happily accept that much. You might as well point out that no physicist fully understands their own field of study. We gain more knowledge, we learn, but we never reach total comprehension. That's quite all right?
Incidentally, I mentioned the virgin birth. The perpetual virginity is a different doctrine. As FarNearEverywhere notes, even the Reformers, who were as strongly committed to the virgin birth as anyone, had doubts about the perpetual virginity of Mary, particularly in light of Jesus apparently having siblings.
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Yeah, because even the Reformers had a falling out about the perpetual virginity of Mary; Luther had no problem with it, but he was still in mindset a Catholic. As denominations got more Protestant over time, and with the fears of Mariolatry, they denied her virginity.
Of course, then down the line, this leads to denying the Virgin Birth altogether, because hey how can a modern person of the scientific era believe in pregnancy without sex, and then it's not a big step to "Jesus was Just This Guy, You Know?", but that's their problem, not ours or the Orthodox
See the Athakist to the Theotokos:
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Transubstantiation and virgin birth are definitely way up there. Trinitarianism was most prominent in mind when composing the post due to having recently read Jewish, Islamic and Japanese Buddhist/Shintoist polemics contra Christianity that glossed over transubstantiation and virgin birth* but shared in common criticism of the trinity as nonsensical and in conflict with monotheism, by people centuries ago that otherwise accepted magic and deities.
It does not have to have been consciously devised as a "point deer, make horse" to have played that role in effects.
*Except for a Japanese author, IIRC Fabian Fukan, who brought it up to argue that Catholicism taught followers bad morals by celebrating Mary's celibacy rather than criticizing that as neglecting her husband.
As an aside, there is a common misunderstanding in the Islamic world that the Christian Trinity refers to God, Jesus, and Mary, not the Holy Spirit.
I think this is an easy mistake to make given these verses. Serious scholars in Islam are ofc aware this is not the case. There is another misunderstanding that the Holy Spirit is the Angel Gabriel (he is also the entity that spoke the Koran to Mohammad, humans, even prophets, being unable to survive a direct communication from God).
The Koran is a surprisingly short book, about 7% the length of the Bible and shorter than many popular novels. It also repeats itself a great deal. More people should read it imo. It makes the behavior of extremist* Muslims much less confusing. The hardest part is the terrible formatting in most English translations. Gabriel switches from directly quoting Allah to Mohammad to speaking seemingly on his own without any clear indicators that the switch had occurred. Good translations will use various means to make this more clear.
*If someone believes the Koran is literally true, there is nothing extreme about groups like ISIS at all. They are following a a fairly literal interpretation of the Koran (in the tradition of the Hanbali fiqh Salafist movement, which is also the dominant tradition in Saudi Arabia)
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Total tangent, but I looked this up and it is very confusing. The story seems straight forward and simple enough, and everyone here seems to be using it in the same way, which is directly referential to the origin story. Blatant lies as loyalty test, might be my definition for the idiom. However, the first couple results when I googled it, all explained the idiom as some variation of, "to lie to manipulate people because you are evil", what is going on here? For some reason I am very upset by this. Are the google translations correct, and the idiom is really that watered down/pointless, or is this just several different people all using the same shitty translation that lacks the nuanced understanding of a native speaker?
There's a lot of background to Zhao Gao (see the Chinese-language equivalent in China, in similar ways to Nobunaga in Japan, Napoleon in Europe, or Benedict Arnold in the United States. Whether because of their coincidental presence at a significant turning point in history or because of their outsized personal impact, there's a lot of connotations to any story including them that are not obvious from the immediate reading.
This is especially complicated in Zhao Gao's case because of the more clearly mixed results of the Qin Dynasty as a whole: the same group that made the Great Wall of China and formalized China as a country (Chin derives from romantization of Qin!) was also a corrupt tyrant, and the very policies that drove the Qin's success also lead to its collapse. Zhao Gao is sometimes upheld as the embodiment of that duality, as a remnant of a past dynasty able to exploiting the strict doctrines of the current one and to drive the first emperor's son to suicide as 'his fathers' (forged) command.
The strict google translation is correct, and useful on its own, but it's often used and useful where the loyalty test isn't simultaneously linked to shittest-giver trying to overthrow a country, or where whatever loyalty test component is far subordinate to the evil machinations.
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Well, I suppose those groups wouldn't have made that polemic because the virgin birth or transubstantiation aren't particularly inconceivable to any of them? Judaism and Islam shared enough Aristotelian metaphysics to make transubstantiation comprehensible, even if false - and of course, virgin births are quite comprehensible. Islam even expressly affirms the virgin birth. The issue with Judaism and Islam isn't so much to do with what's obvious or not as with those traditions' strong convictions regarding the unity of God.
I guess my question is whether there's any sort of "calling a deer a horse" effect here at all? Atheists today have a worldview that makes some of these beliefs seem ridiculous on their face, so it would be difficult for them to affirm them.
However, the people who made these claims historically, and who argued against them polemically, would not have found them implausible in that way. You note a Japanese author whose criticism of the virgin birth isn't that such a thing is impossible, but rather that its moral implications are questionable. Or if we take the Islamic criticism of Christianity - as I understand it, the central Islamic critique is not that the Trinity is obviously ridiculous, but rather that the Trinity is unsuitable to the dignity of God. It's not that the Trinity is absurd, but that it's insulting.
Take this:
I am not sure this ever happened?
Christians certainly compelled people to confess belief in the Trinity - that's not in question. But I question that this was ever something plainly false, with the effect (even if unintended) of revealing intellectual dissidents? Confessions of faith like that are frequently tests to try to discover heretics or dissidents; I just doubt that the logic was ever to get someone to confess something against their own reason. Trinitarians believe that the Trinity is fully in accordance with reason; and non-Trinitarians generally had their own, substantive reasons for rejecting it.
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