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

John Shelby Spong

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

John Shelby Spong

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" Jesus represents the possibilities of a new dimension of existence that transcends all the boundaries that restrict us from opening ourselves to God and allowing this source of love to flow through us. "

John Shelby Spong

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

John Shelby Spong

" 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. "

John Shelby Spong

" The church is not going to survive if they are going to tell people that they have to twist their minds into 1st century pretzels. "

John Shelby Spong

" Terrorism is a real despair. These are people for whom life has been so negative that they're willing to die if they can take down some of their enemies. "

John Shelby Spong

" 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. "

John Shelby Spong

" Mother Nature is not sweet. "

John Shelby Spong

" I believe that God is very real. "

John Shelby Spong

" 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. "

John Shelby Spong

" I experience God as the power of love. "

John Shelby Spong

" I think one of the things we've got to look out for is human beings claiming that they know how God operates. "

John Shelby Spong

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

John Shelby Spong

" 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. "

John Shelby Spong

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

John Shelby Spong

" God is a presence that I can never define but I could never deny. "

John Shelby Spong