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" Let me say that I consider myself a deep believer in the reality of God. I might define God quite differently from the way some people in the Christian faith would do so, but I do not doubt the reality of that experience. "

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" 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.' "

John Shelby Spong

Create

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World

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

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

John Shelby Spong

Among

Who

" 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. "

" I believe that is what the God experience does for us. It calls us beyond our limits into the fullness of life - into a capacity to love people we are not taught to love - and into an ability to be who we are. "

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

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

" 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. "

" Religion is a mixed blessing. "

" 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. "

" I believe that God is very real. "

" 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. "

" 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 don't think much about my physical body going off into the long, green fairways of Heaven to play golf. "

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

" Many of the characters who appear in the pages of the Fourth Gospel are literary creations of its author and were never intended to be understood as real people, who actually lived in history. "

" 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

People

Meaning

" I live on the other side of Copernicus and Galileo; I can no longer conceive of God as sort of above the sky, looking down and keeping record books. "

" Our English language really says if you're not a theist, the only alternative is to be an atheist. What I'm trying to do is develop a language that will enable us to talk about God beyond the, what I think, are sterile categories of theism and atheism. "

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

John Shelby Spong

Trying

Christian

" Inequality for gay and lesbian people is no longer a debatable issue in either church or state. "

" I experience God as the power of love. "

" I want the traditional family upheld, but I don't want it upheld to the detriment of other people. "

" 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. "

" It appears to be in the nature of religion itself to be prejudiced against those who are different. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" When I grew up in the South, I was taught that segregation was the will of God, and the Bible was quoted to prove it. I was taught that women were by nature in inferior to men, and the Bible was quoted to prove it. I was taught that it was okay to hate other religions, and especially the Jews, and the Bible was quoted to prove it. "