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" I admire our ancestors, whoever they were. I think the first self-conscious person must have shaken in his boots. Because as he becomes self-conscious, he's no longer part of nature. He sees himself against nature. He looks at the vastness of the universe and it looks hostile. "

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" I spend my life studying that book, and every book I've written has in some sense been a book about the Bible, and that's what I mean by reclaiming its value and its essence for a world that no longer treats it literally and no longer reads it traditionally. "

John Shelby Spong

Value

Life

Book

" I do not live in a world where people can walk on water, or still a storm, or take five loaves of bread and feed 5000 men plus women and children. If that is a requirement of my commitment to Jesus, I find it difficult to stretch my mind outside the capacities of my world view. "

" You can't have a world where 50 percent of the people are dieting and 50 percent of the people are starving if you want stability. "

" The way that I see Christianity is that its role is to enhance the life of every person. "

" My basis of morality is this: does this action enhance life, or does it denigrate life? Does it build up or does it tear down? "

John Shelby Spong

Life

Build

" You learn that you either are going to have a police state where you don't have any freedom left, or you're going to build a world that doesn't create terrorists - and that means a whole different way of 'getting along.' "

" Perhaps the most telling witness against the claim of accurate history for the Bible comes when we read the earliest narrative of the crucifixion found in Mark's gospel and discover that it is not based on eyewitness testimony at all. "

" If you begin to give people hope that there is a brighter future, there is a new tomorrow, then the people who were yesterday's terrorists become tomorrow's elected officials and they're part of the system. "

" The Christ path is the path I've walked all my life, so it's normal and natural. And I have no reason to abandon it because it leads to where I want to go. "

" Religion is a mixed blessing. "

" We've got to deal with the fact that the church has been violently prejudiced against gay people. We've murdered them; we've burned them at the stake; we've run them out of town for something over which they have no control. And that's immoral. "

" The audience that I try to reach are members of what I call the church alumni association. Now they are people who have not found in institutional religion a God big enough to be God for their world. "

" Mother Nature is not sweet. "

" I think the best way to view the Gospels is to view them as a magnificent portrait being painted by Jewish artists to try to capture the essence of a God experience that they believe they had with Jesus of Nazareth. "

" I learned early in life that you get places by having the right enemies. "

" I experience God as the power of love. "

" The God of the Hebrews is a God that human language, we're not even supposed to speak the holy name. We were told in the Second Commandment we could make no images of this God, and I don't think that means just building idols, I think that means also trying to believe you've captured God in your words, in the Creeds, in the Scriptures. "

" I am a child of the 21st century. "

John Shelby Spong

I Am

Child

" Oh the Christian church has encouraged enormous immaturity among the peoples who are its primary adherence. "

John Shelby Spong

Among

Who

" If I were a child of Tibet or of Arabia, I suspect the path I'd walk would be the Buddhist path or the Muslim path. And I don't mind saying that I don't invalidate any of those paths. "

" I find that children have very little trouble understanding non-literal stories. "

" The Christians tried to separate themselves from the Jewish crowd so they wouldn't be the recipients of the persecution of the Romans. And the way they did it was to say, the Jews killed our hero too. And so Christians began to define themselves over against the orthodox party of the Jews as a way of surviving against the Roman onslaught. "

" There is no way that the Fourth Gospel was written by John Zebedee or by any of the disciples of Jesus. The author of this book is not a single individual, but is at least three different writers/editors, who did their layered work over a period of 25 to 30 years. "

" In academia, I discovered that issues and insights, commonplace among the scholars, are viewed as highly controversial and even as 'heresy' in the churches. "

" I believe that God is very real. I believe that I live my life every day inside the reality of this God. I call this God by different words. I describe God as the source of life and the source of love and the ground of being. "

" The Bible tells me that every life is holy; the Bible tells me that every life is loved; the Bible tells me that every life is called to be all that it can be. "

" I am trying to understand what it means to be a Christian without being religious. "

John Shelby Spong

Trying

Christian

" Plenty of people out there think of me as the Antichrist or the devil incarnate because I do not affirm the literal patterns of the Bible. But the fact is I can no more abandon the literal patterns than I could fly to the moon. I just go beyond them. "

" When I'm asked to define God, I'm almost wordless. "

" Whatever diminishes life is evil, and whatever enhances life is good. "