Do Christians believe in one all powerful god? They say that they do. Such a belief can be found clearly stated in the opening sentence of the Apostles' and Nicene creeds. But then they have the doctrine of the Trinity which states that here are three persons in their one God. What does that mean?
The Trinity is their way of explaining how Jesus can be god too. He's often referred to as the "Son of God" in the New Testament, but if this were literally true then that would entail that God would have created a second god of either lesser or equal power. Christianity is based on Judaism and it attempts to maintain the facade of monotheism. If there are actually two gods, Yahweh and Yahweh's son, Jesus, then Christianity would be polytheistic. This would create problems because Christians would have to still abide by Yahweh's laws that they worship no other gods beside him. So instead they invented a doctrine that says that Jesus was God too. So God didn't really send his literal son. He sent himself down to earth. So Jesus is God. God is God and throw in the Holy Spirit, which sounds pretty much like a euphemism for God, and you have a doctrine which allows for three parts to one all-powerful god.
Not a bad save, except that it doesn't make any real sense. If you ask a theologian they may have some really complicated philosophical explanation that obfuscates the reality that they don't really know how something like that works. A little spin and they call it a "divine mystery." Of course it's God, so humans with their pathetic little brains don't need to understand it. Just humble yourself and accept that you can't understand it. The real reason you can't understand it is that it isn't intelligible. It might as well have been the ruminations of a mad man. At least the Jewish religion is a little bit more coherent. They say one god and they actually mean it. Just one. There are no parts to God.
The interesting thing to note is that out of the four canonical gospels only the latest gospel, John, refers to Jesus as being divine. The other synoptic gospels never mention it. Odd that the three other gospel writers never seemed to feel the need to mention that the person they were writing about claimed to be God. This is a rather important detail to leave out if you're trying to make a record of Jesus' life and teachings, leading scholars to believe Jesus probably never taught that he was God, that in fact this was a later theological development. As well, for historical sake, the title Son of God did not mean the same thing to the ancient Jews of Jesus' day that it means to us today. For a Jewish person in the first century to be called Son of God was simply to call him holy or in a close relationship with god.
The Catholics, have actually stretched the concept of monotheism beyond any sense of modesty by claiming that the Pope actually has the authority to declare that certain dead Christians are in heaven and can be recipients of prayers and perform miracles. They can intercede for the faithful and apparently certain Saints are better at interceding for certain things, hence the concept of patron saints. So now we have a whole pantheon of gods... er... saints to pray to for various worldly things. If you felt you needed a goddess to pray to, well, there's always the Blessed Virgin Mary. She was a human being but has been so elevated in Catholicism to a point where you can pray to her to do basically what you would ask of God. According to Catholic tradition, which is code for really old bullshit that was maintained orally for centuries before it was written down anywhere, she was born without sin, which itself means she was in fact conceived by God too. The immaculate conception does not refer, as I once assumed as a child, to Jesus' immaculate conception but Mary's. Mary was born free from original sin. Besides Adam and Eve, who committed the so called original sin, and Jesus, no other human beings can say that. Mary never died either but was taken up into heaven, body and all. The Feast of the Assumption is a major celebration in Catholicism and it's not even in the Bible.
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