The Christians tried to separate themselves from the Jewish crowd so they wouldn't be the recipients of the persecution of the Romans. And the way they did it was to say, the Jews killed our hero too. And so Christians began to define themselves over against the orthodox party of the Jews as a way of surviving against the Roman onslaught.
— 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.
I believe that God is very real.
I learned early in life that you get places by having the right enemies.
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.
Mother Nature is not sweet.
Whatever diminishes life is evil, and whatever enhances life is good.
I experience God as the power of love.
It's just not easy enough to say that I pray and God will accomplish.
I live on the other side of Charles Darwin and I can no longer see human light as having been created perfect and falling into sin, I see us rather emerging into higher and higher levels of consciousness and higher and higher levels of complication.
I think that anything that begins to give people a sense of their own worth and dignity is God.
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.
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.
Religion is a mixed blessing.
The God of the Hebrews is a God that human language, we're not even supposed to speak the holy name. We were told in the Second Commandment we could make no images of this God, and I don't think that means just building idols, I think that means also trying to believe you've captured God in your words, in the Creeds, in the Scriptures.
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.
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.
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.'
All religion seems to need to prove that it's the only truth. And that's where it turns demonic. Because that's when you get religious wars and persecutions and burning heretics at the stake.
