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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.
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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