Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

John Shelby Spong
Age: 93
Born: 1931
Born: June 16
Author
Philosopher
Priest
Theologian
Writer
Charlotte
North Carolina
World
Didn
Thinks
Responded
People
Look
Girls
Hormones
Matter
Choice
Obnoxious
Looks
Choose
Woke
Something
Nobody
Homosexuality
Years
Longer
Twelve
Make
Choices
Scientific
Thinking
Girl
Medical
Heterosexual

More quotes by John Shelby Spong

Image
Mother Nature is not sweet.
John Shelby Spong
Image
The Sins of Scripture is an interesting title most people don't put sins and scripture together in the same title. It jars people.
John Shelby Spong
Image
So who is God? No one can finally say. That is not within human competence. All we can ever say is how we believe we have experienced God, doing our best to dispel our human delusions. Let me try to do just that. I experience God as the source of life calling me to live fully and thus to respect life in every form as embodying the holy.
John Shelby Spong
Image
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
Image
[Charles] Darwin, for example, is the one who made us face the fact that the primary way we tell the Christ story doesn't work anymore.
John Shelby Spong
Image
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
Image
We have a democracy within the bounds of a constitution which provides certain guarantees related to the basic humanity of every person. I think that's the best way to go.
John Shelby Spong
Image
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
Image
When the dust settles and the pages of history are written, it will not be the angry defenders of intolerance who have made the difference. The reward will go to those who dared to step outside the safety of their privacy in order to expose and rout the prevailing prejudices.
John Shelby Spong
Image
I know that Arnold Toynby, the great historian, said he had always hoped the religions of the world would evolve until they began to bring the very best of each tradition into one tradition. He hoped that Christianity would be the one religion that finally incorporated the values of Hinduism and Buddhism, and enriched itself with them.
John Shelby Spong
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I find it fascinating that Paul [the apostol], writing to the Galatians, responds to the question, What does it mean to live in Christ? by saying, There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
John Shelby Spong
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Some people think prayer is telling God what to do. I don't think that's the case.
John Shelby Spong
Image
If you want to be a Roman Catholic scholar and write, you've got to write in such a way that nobody understands what you're saying, and then you're thought to be profound.
John Shelby Spong
Image
Human wholeness can never be found in the denigration of another
John Shelby Spong
Image
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
Image
The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.
John Shelby Spong