« All Religion Quotes · John Shelby Spong's Page
Religion Quotes by John Shelby Spong
- The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.
- The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.
- 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…
- Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.
- The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its…
- 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…
- True religion is not about possessing the truth. No religion does that. It is rather an invitation into a journey that leads one toward the…
- The priesthood in many ways is the ultimate closet in Western civilization, where gay people particularly have hidden for the past two thousand years.
- 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…
- Religion is a mixed blessing.
- It appears to be in the nature of religion itself to be prejudiced against those who are different.
- 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…
- ...secular journalists... tend to accept uncritically the oft - repeated Evangelical Protestant and Conservative Roman Catholic definitions that the Bible is anti - gay. If…
More Religion Quotes
- A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler… — Aristotle
- Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life. — Aristotle
- Religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. Often, they don't want to give up their egotism. They want their… — Karen Armstrong
- Islam is a religion of success. Unlike Christianity, which has as its main image, in the west at least, a man dying… — Karen Armstrong
- Compassion is not a popular virtue. Very often when I talk to religious people, and mention how important it is that compassion… — Karen Armstrong
- I am not interested in the afterlife. Religion is supposed to be about losing your ego, not preserving it eternally in optimum… — Karen Armstrong
- There are some forms of religion that are bad, just as there's bad cooking or bad art or bad sex, you have… — Karen Armstrong
- Every fundamentalist movement I've studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is convinced at some gut, visceral level that secular liberal society wants… — Karen Armstrong
- Zionism was originally a rebellion against religious Judaism and the PLO Charter was essentially secularist. But because the conflict was allowed to… — Karen Armstrong
- Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night. — Isaac Asimov
- To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today. — Isaac Asimov
- Preach the Gospel at all times and when necessary use words. — Francis of Assisi