This is a spin off from the NDE thread.

Hindu mythos tells of Natchiketas who criticized his father severely for sacrificing only the poorest and sickest animals of the herd etc. As it was customary to give a child to be apprenticed, he then asked his father to whom he should be given. His father, stung by criticism replied, "I shall give you to death." So Natchiketas went to Death's house and knocked, but Death was out doing his job and left him there for qute a while. Later Death came home, found his guest unattended, was embarrassed and agreed to answer any three questions Natchiketas might ask.

Natchiketas asked how many gods there are. Death replaied, "Where there is water there is a god." Natchiketas said, "Yes, but really, how many gods are there?" Death said, "Nine thousand Nine Hunded Ninety and Nine."  Natchiketas asked, "Yes but really how many ..." and so on for quite a while, until finally Death responded, "There is but One God." Then Natchiketas asked, "But what about all the other Nine Thousand Nine Hundred and Eight?" Death said, "Those are but God's other modalities and appearances."

In the modern Christian rituals, especially of the Catholic Church, we hear of the "Blessed Trinity" - meaning , according to Catholicism, the "three Persons in the One God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost".  This is an obvious source of contention, which inspired Mohammed to object that "God is One, not three".

The topic seems to have fallen into what Bertrand Russell viewed as a fallacy of misplaced concreteness, seeing a thing where njo thing is implied.  This is doubtless due to the thousands of scribes who missed the point in the intervening years. The result has been an idea of three obdurate and separable Godheads. This doesn't make sense. I propose three basic arguments in this respect.

First, there can be only a single universally valid God. If there were two, and they were equipotent, they would be the same, non-differentiable. The fact that the Hindu cites "Brahman" as Creator, the Jew cites "Yaweh", the Buddhist refers to "Mind" and New Age folks simply say "God", makes no particular difference. It's all the same underlying principle, that must have been immanent in relative voidness. Perhaps physics would cite the half bit of entropy at the Planck level that characterizes all dynamic systems, and might view Heisenberg,  Friedman and Lemaitre as prophets of the "Big Bang".

(I'm not a Big Bang ganger, although most of their model seems to work. I suspect that other mechansms also apply.)

Second, God is not static, else we'd have only one point of definition that never moves.

Thus, God must be dynamic.

For all dynamic systems, God included, there must be change arising out of Yesterday by which Today occurs and Tomorrow is created, and in such a way that Tomorrow relates to Today the same way Today relates to Yesterday. Three ordinal (time) intervals, yet one activity.

Similarly, God must create out of a prior state, so we can call that aspect of God the Father", since it is the source of the next part.

Then there is that which is created, arising directly out of God stuff in some manner. In its projection it has a dynamic nature, carrying the Father state forward as a process. We call that the "Son" in the sense that it is a projection that arises out of the Father state.

Finally, all of the process is tied together through an overlying system of logic and relationships that are pertinent to and part of both Father and Son, yet differentiable by virtue of being relational in nature. This is the "Holy Spirit", or "Mediator" in the sense that it is both the logical mechanism and the reconciliation of the projection of the Son state from the Father state.

For me, God is a statistical phenomenon, an entropy flux resolving otherwise chaotic space. This is not different from the other ideas except in emphasis. I take a "Holy Spirit" approach as opposed to the other options of Creator or Created Projection.

Third, this precise same three aspect nature is true of all of us. We are as we are, the source of our emanations of life force. We are dynamic in nature and we act to project ourselves into the world, using our projections as the dynamic by whch we manifest our prior nature. And we are logically extended by a mediating principle that keeps the source, projection, and intermediay aspects together.

In fact, any dynamic system has Father, Son and Holy Spirit homologues. And if the dynamic system operates under feedback, it is no different except in scale from the operaton of the entire cosmos and its Creator

(It's been 55 years since I took a Catholic catechism class, but I think I've handled the topic fairly.)

dave

If there is only a single universally valid God, then can there be a devil or a Satan?

If there is only a single universally valid God, then what is evil?

Hi Dave Im thinking about of the time of when Moses tryed to get the egyptian pharoh to let the people of Isreal go and because he just kept refusing God took the life of every first egyptian child born including the pharoh's child and the part what comes to mind, is that when his first born died he layed him in the arms of this statue of some God he worshiped and asked it to bring the childs life back ,but if he had asked the one and only true "Our God in Heaven" then he may have got his wish,as i read what you have written Dave this just came to me of Moses.

Love and God bless     Love  Juditha