So you are saying that we can completely disregard all the historical basis and textual writings and language specifics behind the development of these doctrines, including the culture of the Israelites and how it was different from the gentile philosophies that later developed the Trinity doctrine. This essentially sounds like a lazy way of saying "We can't possibly understand so why bother".
My god. Why is it always these extremes? I'm not saying you don't look at these things. All I am saying is quit being so absolutist in your pronouncements of them. I'm saying it is a fallacy we can claim to really understand something that by no means is overwhelming enough in evidence to proclaim anything approaching certitude regarding anything in recorded history.
The scholarship is fine, and it can be useful to help paint a general picture, but that picture should be held lightly, not with an iron fist. Every model we have should be taken as such, useful, but not infallible, not permanent, not fixed, not the "Truth!", not as "facts", etc. There are degrees of certitude, and history is not high up on that scale.
And to muddy the waters even further, those things that are higher on that scale are themselves only relatively true to our position of how we approach and filter understanding. The truth is realitive to us. We cannot as observers, be truly objective. The truth to a 5 year old, looks entirely different than it does to a 50 year old. Paragdim shifts radically alter what we call truth, and takes what we thought was certitude before and dissolves it. The set of eyes you look through, limit. And therefore certitude is not certain at all.
Who are you to say that we won't even be within a galaxy's proximity of the truth? That kind of bold assertion is what's galaxies away. We CAN know a basic idea of what they belived. Hyperbole will get you nowhere, and neither will completely throwing out the entire field of historical and biblical research.
"Completely throwing out". Extremes again.
I can say our certitudes are not so certain based upon the history of seeing how people believed things a certain way historically, and how that understanding is always moving and shifting. Based upon developmental studies, based upon psychology, based on epistemology, based on lots and lots of areas of research that shows the fuzziness of reality and knowing.
Or rather, you don't think objectivity is something to be considered for argument.
I don't think the claim of evidence is as much the trump card as most like to think it is. It's good to look at it and consider it. But its good to consider other points of view as well, because the nature of how we arrive at these truths has its place, but not as absolutes. And the models themselves can limit and blind us to possibilities as we try to fit everything within them. People mistake models of reality, or systems of knowledge, with some imaginary goal of absolute knowing. They are all best approached as tools of relative knowing. And those tools themselves should be held as limited as well, and therefore, only limited in results.
That makes absolutely no sense. Basically what you're doing is trying to say that it's impossible to have a coherent discussion on a particular view of God. So why do you even bother?
We can have a discussion about God, but to lay out sharply defined lines saying this is true and this is false, is a failure of discussion. We're not talking about God anymore, but your ideas or some beliefs. Ultimately God is apprehended spiritually, not comprehended mentally. There is a difference between apprehension and comprehension. There is a difference between mental concepts and spiritual knowledge.
