God is simultaneously himself his son (and a ghost). Makes sense.- Richards Dawkins
Forgive me for stating the obvious, but the Christian doctrine of the trinity is utterly ridiculous. Not only do I find the idea to be unfeasible and nonsensical, but as far as I can tell, it isn’t even necessary for the Christian religion to exist....I understand the trinity as much as most Christians do, probably more than most. I find it utterly vacuous, incoherent and superfluous to the rest of Christian doctrine.
http://undeniably-atheist.blogspot.com/2011/05/trinity-is-absurd.html
"Christ, according to the faith, is the second person in the Trinity, the Father being the first and the Holy Ghost third. Each of these persons is God. Christ is his own father and his own son. The Holy Ghost is neither father nor son, but both. The son was begotten by the father, but existed before he was begotten--just the same before as after. Christ is just as old as his father, and the father is just as young as his son. The Holy Ghost proceeded from the Father and Son, but was equal to the Father and Son before he proceeded, that is to say, before he existed, but he is of the same age as the other two. So it is declared that the Father is God, and the Son and the Holy Ghost God, and these three Gods make one God. According to the celestial multiplication table, once one is three, and three time one is one, and according to heavenly subtraction if we take two from three, three are left. The addition is equally peculiar: if we add two to one we have but one. Each one equal to himself and to the other two. Nothing ever was, nothing ever can be more perfectly idiotic and absurd than the dogma of the Trinity."
[Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 4, p. 266-67].
"There is scarcely any thing, however, too absurd or too extravagant for a Trinitarian to say, or suppose, when he is called upon to fence round, and to defend, the idolatrous doctrine of the Trinity; to the blasphemous absurdities of which he has surrendered his judgment. He has so many absurd positions to maintain, that he becomes familiar with absurdity; and is ever ready to take any amount of it under his guardianship."
~George Stuart Hawthorne (M.D.)
The Christians, scarcely content with the crowd of enigmas with which the books of the Jews are filled, have besides fancied they must add to them a great many incomprehensible mysteries, for, which they have the most profound veneration. Their impenetrable obscurity appears to be a sufficient motive among them for adding these. Their priests, encouraged by their credulity, which nothing can outdo, seem to be studious to multiply the articles of their faith, and the number of inconceivable objects which they have said must be received with submission, and adored even if not understood.
Baron D'Holbach
“The hocus-pocus phantasm of a God like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads, had its birth and growth in the blood of thousands and thousands of martyrs... In fact, the Athanasian paradox that one is three, and three but one, is so incomprehensible to the human mind, that no candid man can say he has any idea of it, and how can he believe what presents no idea? He who thinks he does, only deceives himself. He proves, also, that man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without a rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck.
[Letter to James Smith discussing Jefferson's hate of the doctrine of the Christian trinity, December 8 1822]”
Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/the-trinity
The Absurdity of the Trinity
Trinitarian doctrine is not designed to actually be sensible but to sound plausible. The above diagram illustrates what the doctrine really expresses. Like a man who tries to detect a how magician's illusion works, but is unable do so, most people are kept in just enough confusion that they are unable to detect how they are being tricked.
http://www.angelfire.com/space/thegospeltruth/TTD/topics/trinityshield.html
The doctrine of the Trinity, observes a celebrated writer, confounds reason and prompts it to revolt. If there be any visible difficulties, they are those which are contained in that mystery, that three persons really distinct have one and the same essence, and that this essence being the same thing in each person, all the relations that distinguish them may be communicated without the communication of the relations which distinguish the persons. If human reason consults herself, she will rise up against these inconceivable statements; if she pretends to make use of her own light to penetrate them, it will furnish her with arms to overthrow them. Wherefore in order to believe them she ought to bind herself to stifle all her powers of investigation, and to depress and sink herself under the weight of spiritual authority. ~J. S. Hyndman
The doctrine of the Trinity has indeed been so sublimated and refined, and so reduced in the rigidity of its old technical terms, that it may now be said to offer itself in some quite inoffensive and unobjectionable shapes to that large number of persons who feel bound to accept it in some shape, and yet are aware that in full mental honesty they can accept it only in the least dogmatic and most accommodated shape.~Rev. George E. Ellis
The claim that there are "three persons in the Godhead" is the invention of men whose aim was only to make religion complex, intricate, and mysterious. Jesus never said anything about three persons in the Godhead. If it were true, He was one of the persons and must have known it. He was silent as to the composition of the "Godhead." Every text that might be said to support such a teaching is ambiguous, while there are numerous texts to prove that He believed in one Heavenly Father, one only God!~John S. Hawley
https://newworldtranslation.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-unreasonable-unscriptural.html
We complain of the doctrine of the Trinity, that, not satisfied with making God three beings, it makes Jesus Christ two beings, and thus introduces infinite confusion into our conceptions of his character. This corruption of Christianity, alike repugnant to common sense and to the general strain of Scripture, is a remarkable proof of the power of a false philosophy in disfiguring the simple truth of Jesus.
https://newworldtranslation.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-hypostatic-union-enormous-tax-on.html
Can any theologian throughout all Christendom to-day give us any intelligible account of its origin and primary meaning? Not one. For that we must go to mythology, which was earlier than our theology, and which alone enables us to explain its primitive mysteries. ~Gerald Massey
https://newworldtranslation.blogspot.com/2019/08/gerald-massey-on-trinity-doctrine.html
In the Fourth Century B.C. Aristotle wrote: "All things are three, and thrice is all: and let us use this number in the worship of the gods; for, as the Pythagoreans say, everything and all things are bounded by threes, for the end, the middle, and the beginning have this number in everything, and these compose the number of the Trinity." The Ancient Egyptians, whose influence on early religious thought was profound, usually arranged their gods or goddesses in trinities: there was the trinity of Osiris, Isis, and Horus, the trinity of Amen, Mut, and Khonsu, the trinity of Khnum, Satis, and Anukis, and so forth.
https://newworldtranslation.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-trinity-and-paganism-by-arthur.html
Alluding to the doctrine of the Trinity, Thomas Jefferson says: "It is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticism that three are one and one is three, and yet, that the one is not three, and the three not one.... But this constitutes the craft, the power, and profits of the priests. Sweep away their gossamer fabrics of fictitious religion, and they would catch no more flies" (Jefferson s Works, Vol. IV, p. 205, Randolph's ed.).
https://newworldtranslation.blogspot.com/2019/04/is-doctrine-of-trinity-taught-in-new.html
Very many Trinitarians have candidly acknowledged the force of one or all of the objections which have just been hinted at. They allow that the Trinitarian scheme is burdened with the most serious perplexities to the understanding, that it is not simply a mystery, like some of the other tenets of their faith, but a confounding and puzzling enigma, teasing their minds, rather than yielding them an instructive idea, straining their comprehension instead of enlightening it.
https://newworldtranslation.blogspot.com/2019/04/the-trinity-doctrine-confounding-and.html
In the earliest Christian documents the Triad idea is not present; it arose, like most of the rites of the cult, by way of assimilation of convenient doctrines from other systems; men trained in Egyptian and Syrian mysticisms turning the formulas of these to the uses of the new system. We need not here ask whether they were "dishonest" or merely "confused." In our strict sense of the term they were both; they could not be "sincere" because their intellectual processes were so undisciplined, so lax, so incompetent. Once set up, however, the trinitarian formula became a stumbling-block for the more intelligent theologians; and many of these sought to rationalise it in some such fashion as I have above indicated. But to do this was to put in jeopardy one or other of the elements of the faith on which its prestige appeared to rest. If "the Son" were defined as a mere "phase" of the Deity, the gospel story in general and the doctrines of the divine sacrifice and the eucharist were resolved into mere avowed metaphors; the hold of the priesthood on the hopes and fears of the multitude would be gone; and with the faith would vanish the revenue. If, on the other hand, the separateness of "the Son" from the Father were alone insisted on, the monotheistic basis, emphasised in the Old Testament, would be upset, and Christianity would be only one school of polytheism competing with others. The insoluble dilemma was met by an unintelligible formula; the Church affirmed both sides of a contradiction; the religious habit sufficed to make the little-reasoning majority acquiesce; and there the dogma stands to-day, a shibboleth fit for savages, the intellectual scandal and demoralisation of the Christian system.
https://newworldtranslation.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-intellectual-scandal-of-trinity.html
The Trinitarian formula is used in all churches for every religious act or ceremony, for the induction into all orders and lodges, even for spiritualistic sessions, and all the more throughout the entire occultism. It is not biblical; therefore, it can only be unbiblical. It is not of divine origin; therefore, it is false inspiration and deception.
https://newworldtranslation.blogspot.com/2019/01/frank-ewald-on-trinity.html
The Translators of our English Bible, able men as they undoubtedly were, translated with a prejudice in favour of the Doctrine of the Trinity; and this led them to commit various grave blunders which, from being accepted as the true Word of God, have contributed to prevent free inquiry, and have also been used as arguments to prove the Truth of the doctrine in question, as if their mistranslations were indeed the Word of God itself.
https://newworldtranslation.blogspot.com/2018/12/how-belief-in-trinity-has-prejudiced.html
Why was not the doctrine of the trinity taught as explicitly, and in as definite a manner, in the New Testament at least, as the doctrine of the divine unity is taught in both the Old and New Testaments, if it be a truth? And why is the doctrine of the unity always delivered in so unguarded a manner, and without any exception made in favour of the trinity, to prevent any mistake with respect to it, as is always now done in our orthodox catechisms, creeds, and discourses on the subject? For you cannot deny but the doctrine of the trinity looks so like an infringement of that of the unity, on which the greatest possible stress is always laid in the scriptures, that it required to be at least hinted at, if not well defined and explained, when the divine unity was spoken of You are content, however, to build so strange and inexplicable a doctrine as that of the trinity upon mere inferences from casual expressions, and cannot pretend to one clear, express, and unequivocal lesson on the subject. ~Joseph Priestley
