Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

Here's the deal on the Holy Trinity.

The are three gods rolled into one, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

It was the Holy Spirit who impregnated Mary.

God the Son was born.

God the Son is also the Holy Sprit.

Making Jesus a what???

Oh boy! Another argument about the three persons of God, the two natures of Christ, and the filioque clause!

I thought the trinity had to do with somebody's symmetry group. Now the symmetric group S_3 on three letters is pretty trivial: By the Sylow theorem, it has a subgroup of order 3 and one of order 2. It is easy to see S_3 is the semidirect product of Z_3 with Z_2. Or maybe the trinity has to with a three-fold covering of some manifold.

That's worth killing for!

anathema anathema anathema
Teresa Nielson Hayden completely misconstrues the debate between Santa Claus and Arius. Chris Cringle did not resort to physical violence in a silly debade about wheter God the Father was human or symbolic. Father Christmas was compelled to use violence in defence of the principle of homoosian which can be translated into the vulgar Italian as consubstansualità or, into the unspeakably vulgar English as consubstantuality or in the unspellably vulgar American as made-of-the-same-substance.

The evil Arius claimed that Jesus was a creature of Jehovah while all decent believers recognise that Jesus and Jehova are homoosian. I don't want to offend the pius by even mentioning the heretics who believe that our Lord and Our Lord are homoiosian, that is, made of similar substance.

There were two Christs, one divine and one spiritual, and the spirirual one laughed while the divine one suffered on the cross.

My favorite heresy. Marcionites? Can't remember.

if god exists, she is black.

Well this is a problem with theology when it crosses the line into dogmatic absolutism regarding metaphysical ontology. You're arguing about something that can never be empirically proved and never be operationally defined, and whose definition can shift with context.

You'd think that most people would realize that this sort of argument is literally unresolvable except by diktate and drop the issue. Most people do. That's why except with prior permission from the participants and host, it is not polite to discuss religion at social functions.

Except that history reliably concludes that people will and do and have time after time killed over issues like this. Historians usually like to pretend that it was really about money, or land, or scapegoating a minority or something at least pseudo-rational or self-interested in however a benighted way. This just goes to show that most historians wouldn't know human nature if they saw it every day.

No, people really will claw each other to bloody little bits over incredibly abstruse semantic arguments about something that as far as we can tell never can be proved in a reasonable manner one way or another. And has little to no impact in almost any conceivable setting except post-death consciousness or the end of the world.

And here is the real key to understanding this. People are more afraid of death, and what may or may not come after it, than they are of dying or killing. And that's what drives the whole thing.

What was Gibbon's gibe, on how many people had died over a vowel.

“Historians usually like to pretend that it was really about money, or land, or scapegoating a minority or something at least pseudo-rational or self-interested in however a benighted way”

So for example, the administration’s PNAC disciples (aka/and the military industrial complex) got us into Iraq on theological grounds? Opportunities to redirect wealth their way played a secondary role.
Thanks for clearing up my confusion on this point.

I am a bit surprised at everybody's missing the only valid point of the debate between St N. and Arius: was Christ of the same substance as God the Father, i.e. non-created, existing from all eternity and therefore fully divine as well as human (St. N.), or was he a created being though the greatest of all created beings and therefore inferior in "status" to God the Father (Arius).
P.S. I have no ax to grind in this being an agnostic interested in theology and history of heresies as a species of human intellectual (?) endeavours.

It's true that people have always had violent differences about abstruse, logically unresovable, issues such as whether Jesus was human or divine by nature. Most of thesse debates may never get beyond the bar fight stage, but some are resolved when one side enlists the aid of politicians who do care about concrete, pedestrian things like money and land.

The Arian "heresy" is called a heresy because Arius's side lost when the other side got the support of the palace in the newly Christian Roman Empire. Debates over whether life begins at conception, God gave Israel to the Jews, Allah guarantees suicide bombers a place in Paradise, or God hates homosexuals, are all abstruse and unresolvable, and they're all major political issues.

Wasn't it just this point that caused the great schism between the Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox?

Dear Jack,

You write:
"So for example, the administration’s PNAC disciples (aka/and the military industrial complex) got us into Iraq on theological grounds? Opportunities to redirect wealth their way played a secondary role. Thanks for clearing up my confusion on this point."

If you call unfounded zealous beliefs about abstract ideology essentially religious, then yes. I am not denying the cronyism and corruption going on there, but I do deny that it was the explicit and foremost purpose. You could say that the corruption was Standard Operating Procedure.

They went into Iraq on essentially what could be called a religious belief, an absolute conviction without any basis in empirical fact. See Richard Clarke's discussion about how it went down, with three witnesses mind you seeing him with Dubya, about Bush's determination to pin it on Iraq.

So stunning and staggering as it is, it was really a religious convinction or the equivalent of one that got us into Iraq and the corruption was just all secondary run of the mill scamming for them.

Robert Waldman, I heard it from my godfather, and he wouldn't fib to me. Furthermore, even a scholar steeped in Greek finicks and crotchets must admit that any time two naive theologians start arguing about the nature of God the Father and His relationship to the Trinity, the Arian heresy may be assumed to be lurking in the background; and if your naive theologians get into a fist fight, you may consider its presence very nearly proven.