John Shelby Spong Quotes:

God is not a Christian, God is not a Jew, or a Muslim, or a Hindu, or a Buddhist. All of those are human systems which human beings have created to try to help us walk into the mystery of God. I honor my tradition, I walk through my tradition, but I don't think my tradition defines God, I think it only points me to God.

source: - "Walking into the Mystery of God" by John Shelby Spong, www.uua.org.

Topics: Christian, Buddhist, Thinking, Mystery Of God, Christian God

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.

Topics: Believe, Trying, Calling, Respect Life

The church is like a swimming pool. Most of the noise comes from the shallow end.

Topics: Swimming, Church, Noise

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.

Topics: Sacrifice, Ideas, Views

All human beings bear God's image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one's being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.

Topics: Respect, Race, Ethnicity, Race And Ethnicity, Race Ethnicity

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.

Topics: Order, Differences, Dust, Religious Tolerance

I do assert that one prepares for eternity not by being religious and keeping the rules, but by living fully, loving wastefully, and daring to be all that each of us has the capacity to be.

Topics: Religious, Christianity, Eternity, Living Fully

I think one of the things we've got to look out for is human beings claiming that they know how God operates.

Topics: Thinking, Looks, Humans

The great danger... in believing yourself especially chosen is that it becomes easy to view those who are not your people as God's especially unchosen.

Topics: Believe, Views, People

I think that anything that begins to give people a sense of their own worth and dignity is God.

Topics: God, Thinking, People

Whatever diminishes life is evil, and whatever enhances life is good.

Topics: Life Is Good, Evil, Life Is

I learned early in life that you get places by having the right enemies.

Topics: Enemy

I do not think of God theistically, that is, as a being, supernatural in power, who dwells beyond the limits of my world. I rather experience God as the source of life willing me to live fully, the source of love calling me to love wastefully and to borrow a phrase from the theologian, Paul Tillich, as the Ground of being, calling me to be all that I can be.

Topics: Thinking, Mindfulness, Phrases

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.

Topics: Biblical, Two Sides, Justice, Great Biblical

Jesus becomes the captive of the hysterically religious, the chronically fearful, the insecure and even the neurotic among us, or he becomes little more than a fading memory, the symbol of an age that is no more and a nostalgic reminder of our believing past. To me, neither option is worth pursuing.

Topics: Religious, Jesus, Memories

My sense is if the Episcopal Church can't stand challenge within its own ranks, then it is not a church I would want to be a member of anyway.

Topics: Challenges, Church, Want, Episcopalians

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 mystery of God. Idolatry is religion pretending that it has all the answers.

source: - "Q&A on The Parliament of the World's Religions". Weekly mailing, September 5, 2007.

Topics: Journey, Religion, Doe, Mystery Of God

Praying and living deeply, richly and fully have become for me almost indistinguishab le. Prayer is being present, sharing love, opening life to transcendence. It is not necessarily words addressed heavenward. Prayer is entering into the pain or joy of another person. Prayer is what I am doing when I love wastefully, passionately and wondrously and invite others to do so.

Topics: Prayer, Pain, Joy, Sharing Love

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.

Topics: Religious, War, Religion, Heretic, Demonic

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 reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.

Topics: Punishment, Forever, Religion, Life After Death, Reward And Punishment

Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.

Topics: Prayer, Religion, Atheism

Mother Nature is not sweet.

Topics: Mother, Sweet, Mother Nature

It appears to be in the nature of religion itself to be prejudiced against those who are different.

source: - John Shelby Spong (2009). “The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible's Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love”, p.12, Harper Collins

Topics: Different

I can only give away the love that I have received.

Topics: Giving

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.

Topics: Accepted, Invitations

When I grew up in the South, I was taught that segregation was the will of God, and the Bible was quoted to prove it. I was taught that women were by nature in inferior to men, and the Bible was quoted to prove it. I was taught that it was okay to hate other religions, and especially the Jews, and the Bible was quoted to prove it.

Topics: Hate, Men, Taught

Plenty of people out there think of me as the Antichrist or the devil incarnate because I do not affirm the literal patterns of the Bible. But the fact is I can no more abandon the literal patterns than I could fly to the moon. I just go beyond them.

Topics: Moon, Thinking, People

Christianity is, I believe, about expanded life, heightened consciousness and achieving a new humanity. It is not about closed minds, supernatural interventions, a fallen creation, guilt, original sin or divine rescue.

source: - "Why We Must Reclaim The Bible From Fundamentalists". www.huffingtonpost.com. October 13, 2011.

Topics: Believe, Humanity, Mind, Original Sin, Closed Mind

...death is ultimately a dimension of life through which we journey into timelessness.

Topics: Journey, Dimensions, Timelessness

At its very core the story of Easter has nothing to do with angelic announcements or empty tombs. It has nothing to do with time periods, whether three days, forty days, or fifty days. It has nothing to do with resuscitated bodies that appear and disappear or that finally exit this world in a heavenly ascension.

Topics: Easter, Religion, Exit, Ascension, Announcements

Biblical higher criticism is preserved in the particular enclave of academic Christian scholarship and is thought to be too unfruitful to share with the average pew-sitter, for it raises more questions than the church can adequately answer. So the leaders of the church would protect the simple believers from concepts they were not trained to understand. In this way that ever-widening gap between academic Christians and the average pew-sitter made its first appearance.

Topics: Christian, Biblical, Simple

The priesthood in many ways is the ultimate closet in Western civilization, where gay people particularly have hidden for the past two thousand years.

Topics: Gay, Past, Years, Gay People

The Bible interprets life from its particular perspective; it does not record in a factual way the human journey through history.

Topics: Journey, Perspective, Doe, Factual

Theism, as a way of conceiving God, has become demonstrably inadequate, and the God of theism not only is dying but is probably not revivable. If the religion of the future depends on keeping alive the definitions of theism, then the human phenomenon that we call religion will have come to an end. If Christianity depends on a theistic definition of God, then we must face the fact that we are watching this noble religious system enter the rigor mortis of its own death throes.

Topics: Religious, Dying, Atheism, Theism, Conceiving

My hope is that a religious consciousness will begin to rise, one based on enhancing humanity, grasping life in all of its complex wonder, having the courage to live fully, to love wastefully and to be all that each of us can be and that it will express itself in our national life in more earth centered, justice enhancing and humane ways.

Topics: Love, Religious, Justice, Humane Way

Jesus' power is the power of human wholeness that ultimately opens, invites and enables human beings to step beyond defense lines where incomplete humanity always hides in order to experience full humanity.

Topics: Jesus, Order, Humanity

I ... look at Jesus and see a humanity open to all that God is--open to life, open to love and open to being.

Topics: Jesus, Humanity, Looks

I cannot say my yes to legends that have been clearly and fancifully created. If I could not move my search beyond angelic messengers, empty tombs, and ghostlike apparitions, I could not say yes to Easter.

Topics: Easter, Moving, Religion, Apparitions, Tombs

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.

Topics: People, Dieting, World

The way that I see Christianity is that its role is to enhance the life of every person.

Topics: Roles, Way, Christianity

It's just not easy enough to say that I pray and God will accomplish.

Topics: Praying, Easy, Enough

I am a child of the 21st century.

Topics: Children, Century, 21st Century

God is a presence that I can never define but I could never deny.

Topics: Deny

I experience God as the power of love.

Topics: Power Of Love

I believe that God is very real.

Topics: Real, Believe, I Believe

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.

Topics: Thinking, Self, Vastness

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.

Topics: Book, Sky, Records, Copernicus

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.

Topics: Real, People, Enemy

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.

Topics: Yesterday, People, Giving, Elected Officials, Brighter Future

Inequality for gay and lesbian people is no longer a debatable issue in either church or state.

Topics: Gay, Issues, People

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.'

Topics: Mean, Police, Way, Getting Along, Police State

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.

Topics: Fall, Light, Perfect, Higher Level

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.

Topics: People, Trying, Church, Alumni

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.

Topics: Believe, Mean, Thinking

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.

Topics: Christian, Hero, Party

The God understood as a father figure, who guided ultimate personal decisions, answered our prayers, and promised rewards and punishment based upon our behavior was not designed to call anyone into maturity.

Topics: Prayer, Father, Maturity, Personal Decisions, Reward And Punishment

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.

Topics: Girl, God, Son

What the mind cannot accept, the heart can finally never adore.

Topics: Heart, Mind, Religion

...secular journalists... tend to accept uncritically the oft - repeated Evangelical Protestant and Conservative Roman Catholic definitions that the Bible is anti - gay. If these people were honest, they would have to admit that the Bible is also pro - slavery and anti - women.

Topics: Gay, People, Catholic, Pro Slavery, Roman Catholic

I would like the church to be a place where the questions of people are honored rather than a place where we have all the answers. The church has to get out of propaganda. The future will involve us in more interfaith dialogue. ... We cannot say we have the only truth.

Topics: Truth, People, Church, Interfaith

Oh the Christian church has encouraged enormous immaturity among the peoples who are its primary adherence.

Topics: Christian, Immaturity, Church, Primaries

In that process of coming to know that which we name as divine, the God who is love is slowly transformed into the love that is God. Let me repeat that...We breathe love in, and we breathe love out. It is omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent. It is never exhausted, always expanding. When I try to describe this reality, words fail me; so I simply utter the name God. That name, however, is no longer for me the name of a being...

Topics: Love, Reality, Names, Omniscient

"I do not believe that Jesus, at the end of his earthly sojourn, returned to God by ascending in any literal sense into a heaven located somewhere in the sky. My knowledge of the size of this universe reduces that concept to nonsense."

Topics: Jesus, Believe, Sky, Ascending

They amuse themselves by playing an irrelevant ecclesiastical game called "Let's Pretend." Let's pretend that we possess the objective truth of God in our inerrant Scriptures or in our infallible pronouncements or in our unbroken apostolic traditions.

Topics: Games, Atheism, Unbroken, Objective Truth

I could not believe that anyone who has read this book would be so foolish as to proclaim that the Bible in every literal word was the divinely inspired, inerrant word of God. Have these people simply not read the text? Are they hopelessly misinformed? Is there a different Bible? Are they blinded by a combination of ego needs and naïveté?

Topics: Believe, Book, People

Papal infallibility and biblical inerrancy are the two ecclesiastical versions of this human idolatry. Both papal infallibility and biblical inerrancy require widespread and unchallenged ignorance to sustain their claims to power. Both are doomed as viable alternatives for the long- range future of anyone.

Topics: Ignorance, Biblical, Two, Infallibility

The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.

Topics: Religion, Atheism, Divinity, Virgin Birth

I want the traditional family upheld, but I don't want it upheld to the detriment of other people.

Topics: People, Want, Traditional Family

Religion is a mixed blessing.

Topics: Blessing

Moral judgment is not life-giving; love that transcends the boundaries of judgment as Jesus' love did, is.

Topics: Jesus, Giving, Justice, Giving Love, Moral Judgment

The way you become divine is to become wholly human

Topics: Way, Divine, Humans

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.

Topics: Miracle, Religion, Atheism, Testament

Human wholeness can never be found in the denigration of another

Topics: Hate, Found, Humans

The biblical texts that we Christians have used for centuries to justify our hostility toward the Jews need to be banished forever from the sacred writings of the Christian church.

Topics: Christian, Writing, Biblical

I don't think much about my physical body going off into the long, green fairways of heaven to play golf.

Topics: Golf, Thinking, Play

Paul's words are not the Words of God. They are the words of Paul- a vast difference.

source: - John Shelby Spong (1991). “Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: A Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture”, HarperOne

Topics: Differences, Historical, Word Of God

Live life to it's fullest, love wastefully, and be all we can be.

Topics: Determination, Live Life

Was Judas Iscariot a figure of history? I do not think so. There is no mention of him in any source before the 8th decade.

Topics: Thinking, Source, Figures, Judas Iscariot

The right to a good death is a basic human freedom. The [2006-JAN] Supreme Court's decision to uphold aid in dying allows us to view and act on death as a dignified moral and godly choice for those suffering with terminal illnesses.

Topics: Godly, Views, Decision, Terminal Illness, Terminal

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.

Topics: Jesus, Views, Religion

Apologetic explanations do not develop unless there is a reality that has to be explained and defended. Jesus was undeniably a figure of history.

Topics: Jesus, Reality, Apologetic

A major function of fundamentalist religion is to bolster deeply insecure and fearful people. This is done by justifying a way of life with all of its defining prejudices. It thereby provides an appropriate and legitimate outlet for one's anger. The authority of an inerrant Bible that can be readily quoted to buttress this point of view becomes an essential ingredient to such a life. When that Bible is challenged, or relativized, the resulting anger proves the point categorically.

source: - John Shelby Spong (2009). “Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: A Bishop Rethinks this Meaning of Script”, p.5, Harper Collins

Topics: Insecure, Views, People, Fundamentalist Religion

Every institution places its ultimate weight on preserving its own life. That is why the Church emphasizes loving God over loving one's neighbor.... The push for justice on the other hand might be at the center of the Gospel but it also attacks the balance of power in the society. Since the rich always exploit the poor, to give the poor power, dignity and humanity makes them less pliable, less cooperative.

Topics: Hands, Giving, Justice

You can't go to church without praying ten or fifteen times for God to have mercy on you. You can't sing "Amazing Grace" without reminding yourself that the reason God's grace is amazing is it saves a wretch like you. This self-denigration stuff - Jesus died for my sins - is nothing but a guilt message. That's the thing we've got to get out from under. That's not Christianity. That's sort of fourth-century Christianity that got turned into doctrines and dogmas that we've never been able to escape.

source: - Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

Topics: Jesus, Self, Grace, Reminding Yourself, Amazing Grace

The Bible has lost every major battle it has ever fought. The Bible was quoted to defend slavery and the bible lost. The Bible was quoted to keep women silent, and the Bible lost. And the Bible is being quoted to deny homosexuals their equal rights, and the Bible will lose.

Topics: Rights, Battle, Slavery

The Bible was written between 3,000 and 2,000 years ago, and it's filled with the knowledge that people had in that period of time, some of which you and I rejected long ago. The Bible says that women are property, that homosexuals ought to be put to death, that anybody who worships a false God ought to be executed, that a child that talks back to his parents ought to be stoned at the gates of the city. Those ideas are absurd.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Children, Cities, Ideas, False Gods

The Bible is full of dreadful things. There's a Psalm that says "Happy will you be when you take your enemy's children and dash their heads against the stones." Don't read that to me on Sunday morning and say "This is the word of the Lord." It's like that crazy man down in Alabama who wanted to put the Ten Commandments in his courtroom.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Morning, Children, Crazy, Crazy Man, Courtroom

I've never met anybody who was helped by being told how wretched, miserable and sinful they are.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Miserable, Mets, Wretched

There's an awful lot of biblical ignorance, and the church perpetuates that ignorance.

source: - Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

Topics: Ignorance, Biblical, Church

I think the worst way to go is to have somebody think they speak for God. If you look at history, every nation that has operated as if it spoke for God has become violently destructive.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Thinking, Looks, Way

In the fall of 1988, I worshipped God in a Buddhist temple. As the smell of incense filled the air, I knelt before three images of the Buddha, feeling that the smoke could carry my prayers heavenward. It was for me a holy moment for I was certain that I was kneeling on holy ground....I will not make any further attempt to convert the Buddhist, the Jew, the Hindu or the Moslem. I am content to learn from them and to walk with them side by side toward the God who lives, I believe, beyond the images that bind and blind us.

Topics: Buddhist, Prayer, Believe, Incense, Holy Ground

The 20th century was a turning point; it freed and emancipated women, broke the back of segregation, and began the struggle to give justice to gay and lesbian people. But the Christian church, in both Catholic and Protestant forms, resisted every one of those humanizing developments. The church was on the wrong side of all three of those fights.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Christian, Struggle, Gay

I think if you're convinced that you're evil, and that God has had to rescue you, then the best you can be is grateful. But nobody ever loves the person they have to be perpetually grateful to. That's just not the way it works in humanity. You need to be set free. You need to be loved just as you are so that you can become all that you can be. That's the direction we have to turn the Christian message; when we do, it becomes universal.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Christian, Grateful, Thinking

I treasure the Bible. I live in it and work on it all the time. But it is not the word of God. It's the tribal story of a particular people, and the best thing about that story is that the story keeps growing and evolving.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: People, Stories, Growing

I grew up in North Carolina being told that the Bible approves slavery and segregation, that it was the will of God.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: North Carolina, Slavery, Segregation

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.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Christian, Gay, America, Anti Abortion, Anti Gay

I think the story of the Christian faith is how you can become more deeply and fully human, not how you can become religious. And I don't see any indication that being religious makes you more moral.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Christian, Religious, Thinking

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.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: America, Abortion, Feminist

I began to read [Bible] as a critic, an in-house critic. So I got to a place where when I got to the university, I just couldn't reconcile that book and some of its points of view with stuff I was learning in my academic career. And so then you have a choice: either you give up your academic career and close your mind and become a constant fundamentalist, or you give up your religion and become a citizen of the modern world and get a modern education, or just spend the rest of your life balancing the two things together, forcing them into a dialogue.

source: - Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

Topics: Giving Up, Book, Careers, Modern Education

I don't see Jesus as rescuing the fallen; I see Jesus as expanding the potential of life. The primary reason the old idea of rescuing the fallen is no good is that there never was a time when we fell from perfection into sin.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Life, Religious, Jesus, Old Ideas

I prepare for death by living.

We have to start at ground zero and ask what it means to have a real connection with God and what it means to pray. We have to recast our whole understanding of God. We live on the other side of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Steven Hawking, a whole group of people who have recast the way we think about reality.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Zero, Real, Mean, Isaac, Kepler

There's no way a human being can escape his or her human-ness to be able to imagine God. We can talk about how we've experienced God, not what or who God is.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Who God Is, Able, Way

I think we have to recover our spiritual nature. The way we have interpreted Christianity does not do that.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Spiritual, Thinking, Doe

One of my great experiences in life was to be interviewed on a late-night talk show by a guy named Tom Snyder. He was interviewing me on a book I had written on the New Testament of the Bible called Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, and we talked about the dating of the books of the New Testament, and I said, "Well, the consensus is that the gospels were written some forty to seventy years after the crucifixion." And he stopped me and said, "Wait a minute, Bishop, that means they couldn't have been written by eyewitnesses."

source: - Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

Topics: Book, Mean, Night, Eyewitnesses, Late Night

If you're really thinking prayer can stop rockets or bullets, you have to ask why some people do get hit by rockets or bullets. Are they people who no one prayed for? Are they people who God just didn't like? I don't think so.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Prayer, Thinking, People

Our problem is not that we're fallen; our problem is we haven't become human yet. The question is, what can make us human, so that we can give life away and give love away and not be grasping after trying to protect our own lives all the time? That's the way I see the Jesus story, and I think it's a powerful and profound story.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Jesus, Powerful, Thinking

It's the 21st century, and somebody has to rise from within this faith tradition and retranslate it for the post-modern world... The Earth is not the center of the universe, therefore, God is not a being who lives above the sky, who splits the Red Sea from time to time, or creates a miracle, or whatever.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Sea, Sky, Miracle, Red Sea

It's almost inevitable that we become religious people. The question is, what kind of religion is it?

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Religious, People, Kind

I didn't choose to be white, I didn't choose to be male, I didn't choose to be heterosexual, I didn't choose to be right-handed. Those are the givens of life. And I don't know why the church can't deal with that, why they can't understand that. Well, I do know why: because people are always afraid of anybody who's different.

source: - Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

Topics: White, People, Church

I want to see Christianity enhance our humanity instead of rescue us from some fall. I don't want us to be depending on this supernatural God up in the sky; I want us to recognize that God is part of who we are and that we have to live out the meaning of God with other people. That means we must live in mutual respect and interdependence; it means we have to limit our own desires in order for the body politic to survive.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Fall, Mean, Order

Anybody who's a mythology ... there's always a fear. That's why we don't like people whose skin color is different, whose eye slant is different, or whose worship is different. It makes them feel insecure. So we strike out. The thing that bothers me most about the Christian church today is that we spend our time confirming people in their own sense of wretchedness.

source: - Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

Topics: Christian, Eye, Insecure, Christian Church, Church Today

I don't think hell exists. I happen to believe in life after death but I don't think it's got a thing to do with reward and punishment. Religion is always in the control business and that's something which people don't really understand.

Topics: Believe, Thinking, Punishment, Life After Death, Reward And Punishment

Human beings are hardwired by however many millions or billions of years to orient toward their own survival. That's why we're tribal people. That's why we're prejudiced people. That's why we treat women as second-class citizens, that's why we are homophobic, and that's why we make religion a weapon to prove we're superior to other people.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Years, Class, People, Homophobic, Second Class Citizens

What we now need to see is that human life doesn't need to be rescued from a fall that didn't happen. Human life needs to be empowered. We have to begin to see the work of God as expanding the humanity of people so that they do not have to relate to one another out of the survivor mentality of fallen people.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Fall, People, Humanity

If you're going to live in a community, you have to refrain from killing one another and stealing from one another. You must have honor and honesty in your dealings with one another. But I think the deeper thing that we need to do is to become so fully human that we don't grasp at life; we give life away. We give love away. We give being away. That is the ultimate work of religion.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Honesty, Thinking, Giving, Dealings

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."

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Jesus, Mean, Writing, Galatians

We are in a survival mentality, and that's hard-wired into our humanity, because we are the winners of an evolutionary struggle of millions and millions and millions of years.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Struggle, Years, Humanity

It's not going to be a straight upward progression, but there's no doubt that consciousness is growing. Prejudices die regularly in the Western world. We don't burn witches anymore.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Doubt, Prejudice, World

Hysterical fundamentalism is not the way into the future; it is the last gasp of the past.

Topics: Past, Way, Lasts, Fundamentalism

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.

source: - Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

Topics: Baby, Kids, Sunday, Pray For Me, Newborn Baby

I've never known about anyone being helped by being told how wretched, miserable, sinful, and evil they are.

source: - Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

Topics: Evil, Miserable, Wretched

The Sins of Scripture is an interesting title; most people don't put sins and scripture together in the same title. It jars people.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: People, Interesting, Together

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.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Country, Religious, War, Great Value

Now, if Mary has an egg cell, then Jesus gets 50 percent of his genetic make up from his mother. And if his mother is a child of Adam, she, too,is fallen so Jesus is not perfect.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Mother, Jesus, Children

You need to identify the values that come out of that kind of belief system, because I don't see them. All the polls I look at say, for example, that adultery is committed as much in the Bible Belt as in any other part of the country. The same goes for abortion, child abuse, spouse abuse or murder.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Country, Children, Abortion

The time has come for us to think of Christianity in a different way. Instead of thinking of God entering human life from outside in the person of Jesus, we have to begin to see human life evolving to the place where it opens itself into an experience of divinity.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Jesus, Thinking, Different

There's one other interesting thing about Western democracy. It didn't arrive at the end point that Karl Marx thought it would that wealth would become more and more concentrated in the hands of the few, that eventually the few would be killed by the many who were deprived, and that a different kind of government would then develop. What happened in Western democracy is that we began to understand that a democratic system can't work if half of the people are starving and the other half are dieting.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Hands, Government, Interesting

Now, the fourth gospel says that the moment that Jesus is glorified is the moment he's put to death on the cross, not the resurrection. The moment he's put to death on the cross is when he shows forth glory, and the reason that is, is that he became free enough to give his life away and to love those who were taking it from him. And that's what God is all about. That's the mystical point of view that was hidden from me for years.

source: - Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

Topics: Jesus, Views, Years

What kind of god is it that some human brain can shatter the illusions that have been built up around such a deity? God's a mystery. I'll never be able to tell you what God is.

source: - Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

Topics: Brain, Able, Deities

Some people in the church, like Martin Luther King, Jr., came out against segregation. But if you look at the bulk of organized religion, you will discover that it endorsed slavery and quoted the Bible to approve it; the Pope even owned slaves.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Kings, People, Church

The trouble with Christianity was that by about 150, there were hardly any Jews left in the Christian church, and so from that time until the last part of the twentieth century, the only people reading the gospels and interpreting the gospels and writing commentaries on the gospels were gentiles who were simply ignorant of the Jewish background, and I just thought they were prejudiced.

source: - Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

Topics: Christian, Reading, Writing, Interpreting, Gentiles

I'm not writing for fundamentalists. I'm writing for the people who have been repelled by that kind of thinking and yet who think there might be something they haven't yet discovered.

source: - Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

Topics: Writing, Thinking, People

The Hebrew scriptures say it's okay to enslave anybody except your fellow Jews. It says you should enslave only your neighbors. I say to people that means Mexicans and Canadians are a bit at risk if we want to be literal about the Bible.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Mean, People, Risk

I was raised pretty much a fundamentalist, but the one thing that fundamentalism gave to me was the love for that book and a commitment to read and study it. The difficulty is that I've read it all, I didn't skip around, I read it all, and when you read it all, you can't take it literally because you don't want to blame God for a lot of stuff that occurs in that book. There are some pretty violent scenes.

source: - Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

Topics: Book, Commitment, Stuff

Some people think prayer is telling God what to do. I don't think that's the case.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Prayer, Thinking, People

The church had to find a way to protect Jesus' perfection so that he could do the work of salvation which, in their frame of reference, only God could do, because God had to come into this world from outside this world to rescue the fallen creation.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Jesus, Perfection, Church, Frame Of Reference

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.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Motivation, Survival, Finals

I think I can tell you how I experience God. I experience God as the power of life calling me to live, I experience God as the power of love calling me to love. That's the God I see in Jesus of Nazareth, that's the God I see in the fourth gospel.

source: - Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

Topics: Jesus, Thinking, Calling, Nazareth

Prayer is not adult letters written to Santa Claus, and God is not some parent-like figure up in the sky who's going to take care of us.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Prayer, Sky, Parent

In my book, The Sins of Scripture, I traced the development of tribal religion, which included ideas like God's killing the Egyptians because they hated the chosen people. Then a God of love finally appears in the Book of Hosea, about the 8th century. A God of justice appears in the Book of Amos in the late 8th century or early 7th century.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Book, Ideas, People

I go to a church here in New Jersey that is just a very exciting place, and I just love to be there on Sunday morning - I just sit there in a pew with my wife, that's all I do, but I'm very much a part of that congregation. We've got a fantastic rector,she brings in people from places like the United Theological Seminary in New Brighton, Minnesota, where you've got good teaching, and our people are being introduced to great material and they really respond. They're able to believe without crossing their fingers. And I think that's a real step forward.

source: - Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

Topics: Morning, Real, Teaching, Brighton, Seminary

Benedict XVI kept saying that homosexuals are deviant. They're not deviant. They're deviant only if you say that anyone who is different from me is abnormal.

source: - Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

Topics: Different, Abnormal, Homosexual, Benedict Xvi, Deviants

When I look back at the Christian faith, I see that we have had to retranslate, almost reinvent ourselves a number of times.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Christian, Numbers, Looks

I still hope. I wouldn't be in this position if I didn't. I love the church. I love the Bible. But I think we're in a time where we're desperately in need of a great reformation.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Thinking, Church, Needs

I think Jesus is a fact of history. I think a man named Jesus of Nazareth lived and was crucified. I think his death interpreted his life in a fantastic way, because if you study that life carefully underneath an overlay of theology and mythology, you'll find that the power of that life was that he was constantly giving himself away. He was constantly calling people to be all that they could be.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Jesus, Men, Thinking, Nazareth

I get letters every week from people who live in rural Texas or rural Mississippi and who feel totally alone. They feel like they must be the strangest person in the world. They don't fit in to the religious milieu of their communities. It doesn't make any sense to them. They read some of my columns and they know that there's somebody in the world at least as crazy as they are, and so they write and say is there anybody else?

source: - Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

Topics: Religious, Crazy, Writing

I've probably read maybe by now fifteen, twenty books on Matthew. I'd say the authors I like best are an English fellow named Michael Goulder, who taught at the University of Birmingham in England, and he writes about the Jewish background in Matthew's gospel, which is part of what I was just talking about, which is just really thrilling to me.

source: - Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

Topics: Book, Writing, Talking

Some parts of the Bible are dreadful. In fact, my working title for The Sins of Scripture was "The Terrible Text of The Bible."

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Titles, Scripture, Facts

The task of the church, for example, becomes less that of indoctrinating or relating people to an external divine power and more that of providing opportunities for people to touch the infinite center of all things and to grow into all that they are destined to be.

Topics: Opportunity, People, Church

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.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Crazy, People, Wish

When we unravel the theological tomes of the ages, the makeup of God becomes quite clear. God is a human being without human limitations who is read into the heavens. We disguised this process by suggesting that the reason God was so much like a human being was that the human beings were in fact created in God's image. However, we now recognize that if was the other way around. The God of theism came into being as a human creation. As such, this God, too, was mortal and is now dying.

Topics: Makeup, Heaven, Dying

In supporting argument for segregation, Paul [the apostol] addresses the people in his epistle to the Colossians, and he tells them how to treat their slaves. "Slaves, obey your masters. Masters, be kind to yourslaves." Paul was in favor of a kinder and gentler slavery; it never occurred to him to raise the question about whether slavery itself was immoral.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: People, Slavery, Addresses, Colossians

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.

source: - Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

Topics: Two, Library, Archives

[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.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Example, Stories, Way

[Jew] didn't believe anything good could come out of a Jewish study. So, what has happened is anti-Semitism has cost the Jews their lives and their property. It's also cost the Christians the ability to read the old gospels, which are deeply, deeply Jewish, and to bring that out is a pretty exciting thing. I'm having a wonderful time with that. I'm just not near ready to do much with it.

source: - Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

Topics: Christian, Believe, Cost, Exciting Things

The Protestant reformation was an attempt to recast the Christian faith in terms of the new learning of the 16th century, the enlightenment learning. It was the first time that the Christian church did not have the capacity to keep itself unified as it recast itself, so it split into Protestant and Catholic traditions.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Christian, Catholic, Church, Protestant Reformation

Men didn't like to empty bedpans, so we made women nurses. Then men didn't like to do the administrative stuff, so women were allowed to become secretaries. That's the way they entered the work force. Then we began to educate them because they had to be educated. But it wasn't until after World War II that most of the great universities of this country became coeducational.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Country, War, Men, World War I

The primary message of the Christian Church is that we were born in sin and we need to be rescued; we cannot rescue ourselves, so God comes to our rescue, pays the price of our sin and transforms us through the death of Jesus.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Christian, Jesus, Pay The Price

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.

source: - Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

Topics: Girl, Thinking, Years

I think human beings are almost, by definition, religious people,in the sense that we ask questions of meaning, we anticipate future events, we deal with the issues of mortality from the first time we see a dead bird as a little child.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Religious, Children, Thinking, Future Events

The powers of nature are so great, and our power is so inept. So,in order to cope with the incredible anxiety that human self-consciousness produced, I think we created God in our own image, and then portrayed this God as having supernatural power that we didn't have.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Thinking, Self, Order, Supernatural Powers, Power Of Nature

So much organized religion, in my opinion, ends up being life-denying.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Opinion, Ends, Organized

That's why the virgin birth never gets rid of the human mother. The story only gets rid of the human father. So Jesus' life was the life of God nurtured through the Virgin Mary. That's because the virgin birth died as a literal story as soon as we discovered that women had an egg cell. It's interesting to watch what the Roman church did about that.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Mother, Jesus, Father, Virgin Birth

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.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Buddhism, Would Be, World, Hinduism And Buddhism

I know Jerry [Falwell] fairly well, and he's probably not bright enough to recognize all of the implications of what he said.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Enough, Said, Wells

Toward the end of his life, [Arnold] Toynby said the Christianity he saw developing was brittle, imperialistic and incapable of reforming itself.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Saws, Christianity, Ends

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.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Men, Thinking, Years, Jewish Faith, Augustine

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.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Thinking, Humanity, Democracy

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.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Horse, Impossible, Like You

I'd like to turn the whole Jesus story around and look at it from a different vantage point, to consider that he was a human being who achieved such promise of humanity that he entered into what I think God is: mainly, the power of life, the power of love and what Paul Tillich, a German theologian of the mid-twentieth century, called "the ground of all being."

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Jesus, Thinking, Humanity, Vantage Point

Some people think prayer stops bullets or rockets or land mines. It doesn't. That's magic, that's not God. Sometimes, you're just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Prayer, Thinking, Land

Another [book on Matthew] is Amy-Jill Levine, who is a Jewish woman who teaches New Testament at the Vanderbilt School of Religion. It's a group of essays by mostly womanly scholars looking at Matthew's gospel through feminists' eyes - very exciting. It opens up all sorts of things that I've never thought about.

source: - Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

Topics: Book, Eye, School, Vanderbilt, Womanly

Matthew is the only gospel that uses the Sermon on the Mount, for example, because that's the new Moses making a new interpretation of the law on a new mountain. So then you begin to put all these things together, and I don't know how you can make sense out of that book if you don't know the Jewish background.

source: - Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

Topics: Book, Law, Together

The demolishment of the power of organized Christianity in the Western world to finally realize the emancipation of women and give them the vote in 1920. Women couldn't even own property in their own names until the last quarter of the 19th century in America.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Names, America, Giving

[Apostol Paul's] views were translated as, "Your rule is to be kind to black people; you don't beat them." It's very much the way we treated women in the 14th and 15th centuries. A woman was not human, and you should be kind to your wife like you are to all dumb animals. That was the mentality.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Animal, Views, Wife

Malachi, the last book of the Old Testament, says, "From the rising of the sun to its setting, God's name shall be great among the Gentiles." This encompasses the whole world. Suddenly it's not the Jews against the Gentiles, or my tribe against your tribe.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Book, Names, Lasts, Gentiles

"You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is your neighbor's." Your neighbor is clearly a male, and the woman, the ox and the ass are property of the male. That's not morality I will salute today.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Wife, Males, Today

Edward Schillebeeckx is probably as fine a New Testament scholar as I've ever read. He's a Dutchman. And he was harassed so many times that it was just painful for him. He constantly had to go to Rome to explain his views.

source: - Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

Topics: Views, Rome, Painful, Testament

The God content of the past no longer sustains the contemporary spirit. We sense that our only hope is to journey past those definitions of a God who is external, supernatural, and invasive, which previously defined our belief. We must discover whether or not the death of the God we worshiped yesterday is the same thing as the death of God.

Topics: Past, Journey, Yesterday

My audience is made up of two groups of people. The first group includes people whose roots are deep in the Christian faith, but for whom the traditional symbols, as traditionally understood, no longer make sense. The other audience is the audience that has left. I call them the Church Alumni Association, citizens of the secular city. They are a bit nostalgic about this faith of their childhood, but they aren't really interested in trotting it out or becoming involved with it again as it is presently organized.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Christian, Cities, Two, Alumni, Becoming Involved

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."

source: - Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

Topics: Mean, Professors, Said

Pat Robertson said the feminist movement was just a bunch of lesbians who wanted to leave their husbands and kill their children. I quoted him in my book. It's a fantastic statement.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Children, Husband, Book, Feminist Movement

We live in a very pluralistic society today. There are Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, atheists, Roman Catholics, Evangelical Christians, and Christians like me. There are a wide variety of religious expressions in this country. I think they all must be treated with respect and none of them must be given priority in the public arena.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Christian, Country, Religious, Society Today, Roman Catholic

We didn't educate women, because the leaders then didn't think they were educable. That changed when a shortage of teachers developed, because men didn't get paid enough to teach school. Then men, who held the positions of power, sent women to teachers' colleges.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Teacher, School, College

I don't make that decision [what next book will be] until I've read enough to know that I've got something different to say and I know how to say it.

source: - Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

Topics: Book, Decision, Next

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.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Jesus, People, Tribes

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.

source: - Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

Topics: Writing, Profound, Catholic

I have no problem with anybody who wants to bear public witness to their religion, but I don't think they can do it on public property. They have to do it on private property. There's nothing unconstitutional about that.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Thinking, Want, Bears

We began to temper Western democracy with what I'd call a social contract. We put in Social Security, graduated income tax, workers' compensation. We developed strong unions to negotiate with business owners so workers got an equitable share of the profits.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Strong, Democracy, Unions, Social Contract, Equitable

We're either going to be driven to a whole new sense of radical interdependence where we are, in the Bible's words, our neighbor's keeper, or destroy ourselves.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Neighbor, Driven, Radical

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.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Tasks, Tradition, Christianity

The first command given by God when Adam and Eve were pitched out of the Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis is, "Be fruitful and multiply, and subdue the Earth." We've been trying to do that for a long time, and now the Earth is fighting back. I'm not sure that we're going to survive as a species.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Book, Fighting, Garden, Fighting Back, Book Of Genesis

I think I could make the case for any kind of organized religion, but I'm not an expert in those, so let me narrow my focus to talk about Christianity.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Thinking, Focus, Experts

What happened in the Western world was that Plato ceased to be the way people thought. Aristotle was rediscovered, and the modern, educated world moved toward Aristotelian thinking.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Plato, Thinking, People

The thing that intrigues me about Matthew is that I don't believe anybody would read it if they aren't Jewish and understand it. And so to say that publicly as a Christian is kind of interesting.

source: - Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

Topics: Christian, Believe, Interesting

In fact, in 1724 the Western world learned that women were co-creators of life that's when it was discovered that women had an egg cell.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Cells, Eggs, World

There are some great values in Christianity, but I think the values are located more deeply in our humanity than they are in our religion. There are certainly some survival values.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Thinking, Humanity, Survival, Great Value

If I want to put a Christmas tree in my yard, or three crosses for the crucifixion story, that's fine. But if I try to use public property or a public school as a way to impress my religion on other people, I think that violates the constitution.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: School, Thinking, People

I see Christianity in very humanistic terms.

source: - Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

Topics: Christianity, Term, Humanistic