Anecdotal Evidence

Some things don't lend themselves well to scientific study. To be studied scientifically, or even statistically, a phenomenon has to be measurable and repeatable. For everything else, anecdotal evidence is all we've got to go by. While I don't swallow that stuff whole, I think it's a mistake to just totally blow it off. People were telling stories long before the scientific method was developed, it's the way knowledge was handed down from one generation to the next for thousand of years. If it wasn't for the story tellers, each generation before the Renaissance would have had to re-invent the wheel. Not only that, stories are entertaining, they catch people's interest more easily than dry academic lectures. Of course they're not all true, but most stories have a certain amount of truth in them, and part of the fun is trying to figure out exactly how much.

I think that most of what I know about the Trinity came from "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", by Edward Gibbon. He was kind of cynical about it, but I think he tried to be historically correct. One of my favorite quotes came from that book: "Man, who imperfectly understands his own nature, presumes to exactly define the nature of the deity that created him."

According to Gibbon, there were several factions of early Christianity that had some very different ideas about the nature of Jesus. When the Romans adopted Christianity as their official state religion, they felt it was necessary to unite all these factions under one flag. There were several conventions of bishops over the years which eventually hammered out a compromise that they felt most Christians could live with. Many of their people remained unconvinced, however, preferring to settle the matter with their swords, as you mentioned. Most of the controversy seems to have involved the Father and the Son, with the Holy Spirit being thrown in for good measure at the end.

The Holy Spirit is mentioned in the Bible, but there isn't a lot of explanation associated with it, which leads me to believe they thought that everybody already knew about it. I think the King James Version calls it the "Holy Ghost" and the Revised Standard Version calls it the "Holy Spirit", both words meaning about the same thing in Greek. Jesus referred to it as "The Comforter" and promised that God would send it to comfort his people when they needed it. A long time ago, somebody on the internet told me that he believed the concept came from the old Pagan days, and that it might have been female. That's about all I know about the Holy Spirit. I suppose Wiki has something on it, and I may look it up one of these days.

Deists talk about right and wrong, but I don't think they use the word "sin" very much. I think the Jews invented it and, of course, Christianity is all about forgiving it. The whole purpose of sin seems to be making people feel guilty so that they will atone for their sins by sacrificing animals. Jesus made this unnecessary by sacrificing Himself, which, if you think about it, doesn't make a lot of sense. I suppose it made more sense to the Jews of the time, since they were used to the concept of atoning for their sins by shedding innocent blood. There is no way you can be sinless, you have to commit the sins so that you can be forgiven. If you did manage to evade all the snares and pitfalls of sin and lead a perfect life, you would certainly be proud of that, and pride itself is a sin. So there you go!

Let us close with an anecdote. I read this in Reader's Digest a long time ago, it's supposed to be a true story: A Sunday School teacher had just finished teaching her class about the historical practice of sacrificing animals, and asked if there were any questions. A little girl raised her hand and asked, "What does God want with a dead sheep?"