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. John Shelby Spong Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
In the first gospel, Mark, the risen Christ appears physically to no one, but by the time we come to the last gospel, John, Thomas is invited to feel the nail prints in Christ’s hands and feet and the spear wound in his side. John Shelby Spong Read Quote
Oh the Christian church has encouraged enormous immaturity among the peoples who are its primary adherence. John Shelby Spong Read Quote
I do not live in a world where people can walk on water, or still a storm, or take five loaves of bread and feed 5000 men plus women and children. If that is a requirement of my commitment to Jesus, I find it difficult to stretch my mind outside the capacities of my world view. John Shelby Spong Read Quote
