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

John Shelby Spong

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John Shelby Spong

" 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. "

John Shelby Spong

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

John Shelby Spong

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

John Shelby Spong

" 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

" I can only give away the love that I have received. "

John Shelby Spong

" A lot of people hear me attacking their certainty. I don't have any interest in doing that. I'm interested in penetrating the meaning of certainty. "

John Shelby Spong

" Was Judas Iscariot a figure of history? I do not think so. There is no mention of him in any source before the 8th decade. "

John Shelby Spong

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

John Shelby Spong

" 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. "

John Shelby Spong

" I never really liked the Gospel of John because I never could find the humanity of Jesus in it. I thought it presented Jesus as a visitor from another planet; in addition, John's gospel is and has been interpreted as a document that fuels anti-Semitism in the church. "

John Shelby Spong

" 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. "

John Shelby Spong

" The cross reveals that we're called to a deeper, fuller experience of what it means to be alive and open to new dimensions of life which our religious boundaries - creeds, atonement theologies - have kept us from experiencing. "

John Shelby Spong

" 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. "

John Shelby Spong

" I experience God as the power of love. "

John Shelby Spong

" I think that anything that begins to give people a sense of their own worth and dignity is God. "

John Shelby Spong

" I live on the other side of Charles Darwin and I can no longer see human light as having been created perfect and falling into sin, I see us rather emerging into higher and higher levels of consciousness and higher and higher levels of complication. "

John Shelby Spong

" 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

" 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. "

John Shelby Spong

" My sense is if the Episcopal Church can't stand challenge within its own ranks, then it is not a church I would want to be a member of anyway. "

John Shelby Spong

" The Bible interprets life from its particular perspective; it does not record in a factual way the human journey through history. "

John Shelby Spong

" 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. "

John Shelby Spong

" I believe God is real, but I believe God calls me beyond myself to take responsibility for my life and to try top work to allow other people to be themselves and to take responsibility for their lives. "

John Shelby Spong

" All religion seems to need to prove that it's the only truth. And that's where it turns demonic. Because that's when you get religious wars and persecutions and burning heretics at the stake. "

John Shelby Spong

" I cannot possibly conceive of my planet Earth as the centre of a three-tiered universe. I know rather that the sun, around which my planet Earth revolves, is a middle sized star in a galaxy called the Milky Way that has over a hundred billion other suns or stars within it. "

John Shelby Spong

" It's just not easy enough to say that I pray and God will accomplish. "

John Shelby Spong

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

John Shelby Spong

" 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. "

John Shelby Spong