John Shelby Spong Children Quotations

I am a child of the 21st century.

I find that children have very little trouble understanding non-literal stories.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.