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The Bible Belt, the religious South, is the section of the country that practiced slavery until the war made them give it up. They practiced segregation. They practiced lynchings. I don't see any great value in that.
John Shelby Spong
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John Shelby Spong
Age: 93
Born: 1931
Born: June 16
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Philosopher
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Charlotte
North Carolina
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More quotes by John Shelby Spong
Jerry Falwell says, on Pat Robertson's program, that the reason we got attacked on 9/11 is that we were accommodating the ACLU and abortion and homosexuals and feminists in America, so God smacked us down.
John Shelby Spong
If the resurrection of Jesus cannot be believed except by assenting to the fantastic descriptions included in the Gospels, then Christianity is doomed. For that view of resurrection is not believable, and if that is all there is, then Christianity, which depends upon the truth and authenticity of Jesus' resurrection, also is not believable.
John Shelby Spong
The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.
John Shelby Spong
I look at American Christianity and I'm almost in despair. I don't want to be identified with it. The Christian vote in America is an anti-abortion, anti-homosexual vote. I consider that to be anti-female and anti-gay, and I don't want to be identified with a God who is anti-anything.
John Shelby Spong
Human wholeness can never be found in the denigration of another
John Shelby Spong
One of my professors said to me once, Any god that can be killed off will be killed, but if I can shake up your faith in your god, it means you already don't have much of a god.
John Shelby Spong
To have a great university library near you with plenty of archives of all the journals that you want to research in the twentieth century is a remarkable asset, and I spend a day, maybe two days a week in that library. I just plain love it.
John Shelby Spong
I don't like to talk about it in those terms it's impossible to describe who or what God is. Suppose you were a horse, and you were asked to describe what a human being was like. You couldn't do it.
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
The trouble is, the same thing that enabled us to survive evolution is also going to kill us, because in the final analysis, if survival is the primary motivation of every human being, then we will finally be in a situation where might will make right and only one person will survive.
John Shelby Spong
I experience God as the power of love.
John Shelby Spong
I don't want a God that would go around killing people's little girls. Neither do I want a God who would kill his own son.
John Shelby Spong
In the private arena, you can do whatever you wish, and people do. These crazy evangelical preachers get on the radio and TV and say incredible things.
John Shelby Spong
You don't take your newborn baby, put that baby on your lap, and say, Now listen, kid, you were born in sin, you're not worth anything, and you've got to pray for mercy. That's not going to raise a healthy adult. And that's what we do Sunday after Sunday after Sunday.
John Shelby Spong
The way you become divine is to become wholly human
John Shelby Spong
The great biblical tradition says that loving God and loving one's neighbor are not two separate actions but two sides of the same action. It was the prophet Amos who bore witness to the fact that divine worship is nothing but human justice being offered to God and human justice is nothing but divine worship being lived out.
John Shelby Spong
The church is like a swimming pool. Most of the noise comes from the shallow end.
John Shelby Spong
We were born in a Jewish world, as part of a Jewish faith tradition. We had to translate ourselves into the neo-Platonic thinking Greek world that took us about 400 years. Then, finally a man named Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, recast Christianity in terms of neo-Platonic thought.
John Shelby Spong
I experience God as the power of life, the power of love and the ground of being. I don't say that's what God is I say that's my experience of God.
John Shelby Spong
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
