There is definitely no god

[citation needed]

How monotheistic is christianity? God is apparently three beings and people also worship and pray to saints, to Mary, to angels.

It's polytheism dressed in a onesie.

The saints are not God. The Saints, are merely average men and women, who proved to be amazing followers of the faith and as such able to carry out miracles by the divine power of the lord.

If you have any real questions on Catholics and the Catholic Church, please ask me, I am a Catholic and have gone to a Catholic School for years.

Gods in all but name. They carried out miracles as you say.

I have no questions on the catholic church, I know it well enough.

@Ace: I'm atheistic but I did have to go through Catholic teachings from my family, so I'll answer your question from the Catholic point of view.

How monotheistic is christianity? God is apparently three beings and people also worship and pray to saints, to Mary, to angels.

According to the Catholics, God has 3 distinct forms. God is all-powerful, so existing as 3 different entities is not exactly a hard thing for him to do. You have God the creator, God the son of man (Jesus), and God the spirit (Holy Spirit). It's all the same God, however, different forms with different purposes.

Angels, Mary, and the Saints are not worshiped as Gods. They are not all-powerful. If you believe that we all have a spirit that goes to Heaven, then calling upon these people with prayers is like asking guidance from a specific person who's knowledgeable in a specific field. You can pray to anyone, even your deceased loved ones. However, you wouldn't be worshiping them as all-powerful, all-knowledgeable beings which created everything.

THANK YOU, I had no way of explaining it that way.

people have a misconception of Catholicism that we "worship" Mary and the Saints

Edited 4/19/2014 02:41:14

Ace and Lolowut, answered that in a previous post.

#ReadBeforePosting

As I said, I do not need to be told about catholicism, I know it as well as you Lolowut. My point remains that it is not really monotheistic, it just jumps through semantic hoops to maintain that it is monotheistic.

The 3-in-one god is the most glaring example of hoop jumping. And God does not exist in three separate forms as you say, three separate entities make up god.

Leo, I do not know what catholic church you are a part of but Mary is most certainly worshipped in the catholicism I grew up with. A defining feature of the catholic denomination is the veneration of Mary as the mother of god, the blessed virgin etc. Idols are built to her (and to the saints). She is said not to have died but to have ascended into heaven.

Now someone will of course point out the hoops, as they already have, and completely miss the point. Tell me the difference between the position of the saints and Mary and angels as opposed to the position of minor deities in polytheistic religions. You pray to Anthony to help you find something. Why not directly to god? Is he busy?

@Taisho
#post only if you have something to say

She is worshiped as the mother of Jesus, not as a god. She is to be revered and prayed to, she, however, is no God.

In Catholicism, there are three 'levels' of worship. I forget the Latin names, but you have the highest, reserved only for God in the three forms that make him up, you have a lower level reserved for almost all beings, saints and angels and you have a higher 'version' of that lower level reserved only for Mary, as she is supposed to be different to all the other creations of God.


EDIT: After 5 seconds using Google I copy/pasted this:

Dulia: the reverence we give to Saints
Hyperdulia: the reverence we give to Mary as the greatest of Saints and Mother of God
Latria: the reverence and worship we give to God alone

Edited 4/19/2014 16:37:40

LUMEN CHRISTI ! :D

This really annoys me. If people think nobody ever questions their faith in God, they are an idiot. Nowhere in the Bible does it say to worship Mary or saints either. And why do you ask for someone to explain it to you if you will not take it into consideration. Speaking of rational thinking, I just can't rationalize the idea that we are here mysteriously and just exist because we just do, and that we have no point to be here.

the FSM is the only deity that can exist because He knows everything and has said that He is the only deity. He boiled for our sins. Worship Him.

Materialism is the antithesis of awareness. You may be ruled by greed without realizing it.

ignore Kleiner Steiner, he seems like one of those Freemason/Illuminati conspiracy people.

Being, look within and ground yourself.

In order to believe in the specific god you have chosen in monotheism you need to validly decide why all the other possible gods are not a valid option fit for worship

Going right back to the beginning - this is a spurious claim. Consider the following scenario:

Imagine your partner were to leave the home and return several hours later. As you are an inquisitive chap you ask her where she has been - 'shopping' she replies. You notice an absence of shopping bags, on mentioning this she replies that she was 'just looking'. Your imagination conjours up several different alternative possibilities:
a. She went shopping
b. She is having an affair with another man and was him
c. She was abducted by aliens who implanted a chip in her to make her think she was shopping
d. She is a spy who lives a double life of which you are oblivious
e. She lied and went to an art gallery.

One point to note about the above is that there are (probably) infinitely many possibilities about what your partner was doing.

In the scenario you are justified in believing a; you certainly aren't intellectually required to rule out all alternative possibilities - to demand we do so would require ruling out an infinite number of options and more importantly is not something we demand in the ordinary requirements of justification.

It strikes me that the case of judging where your partner has been is epistemically analogous to that presented by the OP to do with religions.

That's not to say that the the theist is off the hook however. Hume presented an argument against faith based on miracles which works on similar but importantly different lines. Hume argued that all religions (or at least many) were able to claim miracles which justified the believers faith in that that there was only one true religion. Hume also suggested that each religion was similarly justified in the claims that their miracles were genuine and that in effect all these competing truth claims cancelled each other out. To illustrate imagine each of the following religions claims 1000 miracles each, all with similar levels of justification:
a. Islam
b. Christianity
c. Judaism
d. Sikhism

In the above case then Christianity would have 3000 miracles which showed that it was not true versus 1000 in the case of its truth - in this instance therefore the wise man would conclude that Christian miracles do not demonstrate the truth of Christianity (at least not exclusively). Mutatis mutandis we can conclude the same for each of the other religions.

This would therefore show that any religion which is based on miraculous claims (or any other religious experience) should not be accepted. This would surely rule out each of the above religions.I wouldn't however conclude that monotheism is wrong - instead I would conclude that each of the religious traditions claims to exclusivity is at best on very shaky grounds.

A far more plausible response, to my mind, is to suggest that each religion contains insights into The Ultimate Reality but skewed in a particular way by the concepts culturally relative ideas and concepts open to us.

Edited 4/21/2014 18:03:31

That's a really shitty analogy. Is your girlfriend cheating on you?

What a charming chap you are Mulva.

Edited 4/21/2014 18:47:04