John Shelby Spong Quotes - Page 8

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• The primary message of the Christian Church is that we were born in sin and we need to be rescued; we cannot rescue ourselves, so God comes to our rescue, pays the price of our sin and transforms us through the death of Jesus.

  John Shelby Spong

  Christian, Jesus, Pay The Price

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• I think I could make the case for any kind of organized religion, but I'm not an expert in those, so let me narrow my focus to talk about Christianity.

  John Shelby Spong

  Thinking, Focus, Experts

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• The Jesus experience expanded people into a position where they didn't have to have defensive tribal lives, "God loves my people, my tribe, anddoesn't like yours." The Bible is full of such references.

  John Shelby Spong

  Jesus, People, Tribes

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• We began to temper Western democracy with what I'd call a social contract. We put in Social Security, graduated income tax, workers' compensation. We developed strong unions to negotiate with business owners so workers got an equitable share of the profits.

  John Shelby Spong

  Strong, Democracy, Unions

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• Men didn't like to empty bedpans, so we made women nurses. Then men didn't like to do the administrative stuff, so women were allowed to become secretaries. That's the way they entered the work force. Then we began to educate them because they had to be educated. But it wasn't until after World War II that most of the great universities of this country became coeducational.

  John Shelby Spong

  Country, War, Men

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• As for the status of Western Christianity, we are in a place where our task is to redefine the primary symbols of our faith or tradition in a more human direction. That's the thing I spend my time doing.

  John Shelby Spong

  Tasks, Tradition, Christianity

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• That's why the virgin birth never gets rid of the human mother. The story only gets rid of the human father. So Jesus' life was the life of God nurtured through the Virgin Mary. That's because the virgin birth died as a literal story as soon as we discovered that women had an egg cell. It's interesting to watch what the Roman church did about that.

  John Shelby Spong

  Mother, Jesus, Father

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• There are some great values in Christianity, but I think the values are located more deeply in our humanity than they are in our religion. There are certainly some survival values.

  John Shelby Spong

  Thinking, Humanity, Survival

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• I have no problem with anybody who wants to bear public witness to their religion, but I don't think they can do it on public property. They have to do it on private property. There's nothing unconstitutional about that.

  John Shelby Spong

  Thinking, Want, Bears

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• In fact, in 1724 the Western world learned that women were co-creators of life that's when it was discovered that women had an egg cell.

  John Shelby Spong

  Cells, Eggs, World

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• The first command given by God when Adam and Eve were pitched out of the Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis is, "Be fruitful and multiply, and subdue the Earth." We've been trying to do that for a long time, and now the Earth is fighting back. I'm not sure that we're going to survive as a species.

  John Shelby Spong

  Book, Fighting, Garden

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• I don't make that decision [what next book will be] until I've read enough to know that I've got something different to say and I know how to say it.

  John Shelby Spong

  Book, Decision, Next

  Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

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• So much organized religion, in my opinion, ends up being life-denying.

  John Shelby Spong

  Opinion, Ends, Organized

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• We're either going to be driven to a whole new sense of radical interdependence where we are, in the Bible's words, our neighbor's keeper, or destroy ourselves.

  John Shelby Spong

  Neighbor, Driven, Radical

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• I think human beings are almost, by definition, religious people,in the sense that we ask questions of meaning, we anticipate future events, we deal with the issues of mortality from the first time we see a dead bird as a little child.

  John Shelby Spong

  Religious, Children, Thinking

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• Nobody in the scientific or medical world thinks that homosexuality is something that people choose. It's something we are. Now, I didn't choose to be heterosexual. I just woke up when I was about twelve years old and girls didn't look obnoxious to me any longer, but I didn't make a choice about the matter. I just responded to my own hormones.

  John Shelby Spong

  Girl, Thinking, Years

  Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

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• What happened in the Western world was that Plato ceased to be the way people thought. Aristotle was rediscovered, and the modern, educated world moved toward Aristotelian thinking.

  John Shelby Spong

  Plato, Thinking, People

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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

  John Shelby Spong

  People, Want, Traditional

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• I am a child of the 21st century.

  John Shelby Spong

  Children, Century, 21st Century

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• I cannot say my yes to legends that have been clearly and fancifully created. If I could not move my search beyond angelic messengers, empty tombs, and ghostlike apparitions, I could not say yes to Easter.

  John Shelby Spong

  Easter, Moving, Religion

  John Shelby Spong (1994). “Resurrection: myth or reality? : a bishop's search for the origins of Christianity”, Harpercollins

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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

  Mean, Police, Different

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• Human wholeness can never be found in the denigration of another

  John Shelby Spong

  Hate, Found, Humans

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• ...secular journalists... tend to accept uncritically the oft - repeated Evangelical Protestant and Conservative Roman Catholic definitions that the Bible is anti - gay. If these people were honest, they would have to admit that the Bible is also pro - slavery and anti - women.

  John Shelby Spong

  Gay, People, Catholic

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• What the mind cannot accept, the heart can finally never adore.

  John Shelby Spong

  Heart, Mind, Religion

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• I go where I'm invited. And all I can tell you is if we accepted every invitation we had, I'd be away every day of my life.

  John Shelby Spong

  Accepted, Invitations, Invited

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