The Holy Ghost / Spirit - WTF is that about?

[Jesus_of_Nazareth]

I can understand having a God, maybe even that he had a son (exactly how has always been a bit of mystery to me ) but a Ghost??

My bet is that alcohol was involved with that idea

[Audley Strange]

You really want an explanation or is this just a dig?

[Jesus_of_Nazareth]

I do have the gist of the history - and that nowadays it is something the mainstreams religion wish they hadn't bigged up quite so much.

The Holy Trinity? - doesn't sound much like Monotheism to me.......

[Audley Strange]

It isn't a monotheism, never has been, in fact the Bible itself points out there are many other Gods, just that Yahweh is a spiteful jealous god. Then there's the anti-god in the form of the Adversary, the archangels, the angels, the walking immortals like Samson and Lazarus.

However the idea of the holy ghost I think is probably one of the more interesting one. Wi-Fi divinity.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

God's wife gets little air time these days.

[Faithfree]

One god, my arse! Much of the bickering amongst early Christians was about whether JC was god or man and whether there was one or three gods. Then Constantine converted to Christianity and the Roman version of the sect took off - winner writes the rules - three being in one god, and scribes goes back to edit 1 John to insert reference to the trinity.

[Audley Strange]

God's wife gets little air time these days.

Yeah well Sophia wisely split after finding out Jehovah raped a girl and then encouraged his bastard son to commit suicide.

[Azathoth]

I was entered by the holy spirit. Made my eyes water

[apophenia]

Well Christians would disagree about it not being a monotheism. An important first question is separating out any occurrences of the term in the Hebrew bible. I am not familiar with the terms existence in the Hebrew bible, however since the Hebrew bible contains many names and epithets for God, I'm not sure it as a term would have special significance, or did have significance to the Jews of any era. I find, in general, many theological concepts that flower into full-blown sciences under the first millennium of the Latin church have little or no precursor in the Hebrew bible and classical Judaism, and are often tortuously reinterpreted. I have a suspicion this is where the holy spirit slides in.

There is an additional difficulty in that, many of the interpretations of theological concepts such as the Holy Spirit were made by church fathers who were removed from the original Levantine and Hellenic Koine Greek, perhaps being less than fully fluent in it at all. I've been exploring Greek philosophy, and one interesting note is apparent: people think about God as logos using a concept of logos that is informed by later conceptualizations, or, worse, by the common English translation of "word". I don't offhand know the meaning of any likely Latin translations, but the readings in non-semitic philosophy seem to render logos more as the reasoning part of the mind, or the creative, thinking part of the animus that is a man. Naturally, if the new testament authors borrowed the term from a culture in which it had that meaning, it has significant bearing on the textual foundation of the concept of the Trinity.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

Mistranslation of "Hairy Goat" - simple as that.

[amused]