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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.)
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.
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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