existence & identity

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In a message dated 11/1/98 4:54:42 PM Eastern Standard Time,
nyquest@montana.com writes:

<< Greetings:  Have your heard the story of A is A?--The formula defining
 the concept of existence and the rule of all knowledge:  A is A.  A
 thing is itself.  Existence is idenity, consciousness is
 identification.  Whatever you choose to consider, be it an object, an
 attribute or an action, the law of identity remains the same.  A tree
 cannot be a bird at the same time, it cannot be all red and all green at
 the same time, it cannot freeze and burn at the same time.  A is A.  God
 cannot be three different identities at the same time.  The Trinity idea
 will in time destroy any credibility Christianity fashioned for itself.
 Building a belief on a false premise is suicide.
   >>

Charlie:

First let me say, I think the bible is a work, or set of works, of fiction
(mythology).

Second, I don't think the bible even supports the idea of a trinity.  The
synoptic gospels treat Jesus as the son of God, not God or a member of God.
All 4 canonical gospels, when they refer the the Holy Spirit, could just be
referring to an angel or manifestation of god, not a person or member of God.

That being said, the above post does have some flaws.  While a bird cannot be
a tree, a bird is a vertebrate, so an entity can belong to more than one
classification in a hierarchy of classifications.  But that's not of much
bearing on the concept of a trinity.

More fundamentally speaking however, there is the possibility of threeness and
oneness in the same thing.  Consider space itself.  It is one, yet consists of
three dimensions.  Any object in one of the dimensions needs be in all three,
and in space itself.  Anything in space itself is in three dimensions.  The
dimensions are amorphous in that we can't just identify each one separately,
as, say height, width and depth, because there are alternative
classifications, such as the polar coordinates of latitude, longitude and
altitude.  Astronomical coordinates exist, consisting, say, of declination,
right ascension and distance from the earth.  Jupiter's position, to take one
example, can be listed in either system at any given time.  Yet no matter what
coordinate system we use, there must always be three dimensions to specify a
position in the one space.

Again, the trinity is just a mythological construct of theologians'
sophistries based on a tendentious reading of mythological scripture, but a
oneness can consist of a threeness, exemplified by space (probably a unique
example, but it does show the consistency of such a possibility).

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