It was said of him....

It was said of him, that he was born of a virgin…It was said that he was the Son of God… that he performed miracles,…. that he died to save us from our sins…These things were said and written about Quirinius of Rome in the year 500 BC…

These same things were also written about, Hesus of the Celtic Druids 830 BC… likewise, Indra of Tibet 720 BC, and Attis of Phrygia 1200 BC, Alexander the Great about 400 BC, and Caesar Augustus …. And of course Jesus of Nazareth in the book we call Matthew, written about 80 AD.

I’m not telling you any deep dark secret… this information is taught in Christian and secular colleges and Christian seminaries around the world.

Such things were written about hundreds and hundreds of Kings and Rulers and religious icons throughout ancient history… These are well documented historical writings, found on tablets and scrolls preserved today in museums everywhere.

Were these events written of because they were actual historical events? Hundreds of virgin births?… Hundreds of saviors? …

Scholars and Historians, both Christian and secular, tell us they were written to say, “This was an extraordinary person,”…They were written to say, “remember this person”, “In this person we have seen something special, we have seen the Holy, in this person we have experienced the divine.” …

Does it matter that these things did not literally happen in the life of Quirinius of Rome or Indra of Tibet …or any of the hundreds of others?…Millions of Christians, might claim that it DOES matter, to them, in the case of Jesus of Nazareth…

For me what matters is that these post-Easter exaltations of Jesus have done what they were intended to do. They have caused us to remember…. For me what is important is that you and I do remember and practice and strive to live the pre-Easter teachings of Jesus… To love one another, to do unto others as we would have them do unto us… to seek justice and inclusiveness for all human beings.

...barry e

Bishop Spong Q&A

Shirley Krogstad from Hendersonville, North Carolina, writes:If you had to name one "belief" of yours that has evolved or grown the most over the last ten years, what would it be?

Dear Shirley,

Since my whole belief system is deeply interrelated that is not an easy question to answer. I like the story told about an elderly bishop who remarked, "The older I get, the more deeply I believe but the less beliefs I have." That is exactly what I feel.

To answer your question more specifically, however, I believe it would be the way I think about God. God is no longer a person, a being or an entity to me. God is rather a presence in whom, to use words attributed to St. Paul, "I live and move and have my being." The "old man in the sky" was the first image to go, then the heavenly judge who kept record books and finally the father figure who desired praise and whose mercy I implored. The invasive, external heavenly deity faded and new images began to intrude themselves into my consciousness.

The interesting thing to me was that while these old images were fading, the God intensity within me remained steady and steadfast. Today I am a God-intoxicated person, but my definition of God is anything but crisp and well defined. I struggle to find words big enough to use when I try to talk about God. God to me is now more of an experience of transcendence, or perhaps the source of life, the source of love and the ground of all being. An experience to me is vastly different from a being who might be described externally. People hear these concepts sometimes as simply words. I hear them, however as a call to transcend all human limits and all human boundaries. God to me is a call to live fully, to love wastefully and to be all that I can be.
A redefined Jesus still stands at the center of my God experience. He is not the one sent to be my savior, redeemer or rescuer. Jesus is not to God what Clark Kent is to Superman, a deity masquerading as a human being. He is rather a God presence through whom I am empowered to be open to the life, love and being that flows through me.

I now call myself a mystic because in my understanding of God I have gone beyond words into a kind of wordless wonder, awe and mystery. This is not where I was a decade ago. I doubt if it will be where I am a decade from now, but it is where I am today and it represents the evolving, growing frontier of where I was ten years ago.

Thanks for asking.
– John Shelby Spong

Imagine for a moment...

Imagine for a moment that there were no religious writings. That such things as the Bible, the Torah, the Koran and other religious writings did not exist. Imagine that mans knowledge of the ancient world came exclusively from history books.

Then imagine that we, the people of the 21st century, were to decide that it was time to sit down and write an epic of our world and of the human race.

Ponder that thought, an epic of the human race, as seen exclusively through the eyes and the worldview of the people of the 21st century…. An epic that would try to explain, as best we could, the origin of the earth, the universe and life on this planet.

Knowing what we do about the cosmos and the formation of galaxies, planets and stars, do you think for one moment we would postulate the idea that a supernatural being of some sort, standing out on the edge of space, creating all that exists?

Knowing what we do about biology and the functions of the human body, do you think for one moment we would suggest that a supernatural being (of some sort) impregnated a young virgin and she gave birth to the son of this supernatural being?

Do you think we would suggest that this supernatural being, by virtue of its omnipotent power, controls the weather? That it speaks to people from the clouds, causes disease to punish, cures disease to reward?

If we were to write the history of the universe, the earth and life on earth from the point of view of an intelligent adult of the 21st century, do you think for even a nano-second we would hypothesize such nonsense?

And yet millions of otherwise honest, well-meaning, intelligent people believe these things to be literally true.

What does this say about the maturity of the human mind? What does it say about the power of the Church to control human thought patterns?

The Church can and should be an agent for change and truth in the world and it should start by becoming intellectually honest about it doctrines and dogma.

barry e

Hungering for Truth

The following article recently appeared in the St. Petersburg (FL) Time. I find it disturbing that the writer – Norma W. – and thousands of others like her, must live outside their religion and cannot communicate intellectually with their families, because the Church continues to withhold the truth of the church doctrine from the people-in-the-pews.
---------------------------------------
I lost my religion in Religion Class. We were a religious family – at least in name. Nobody I knew would have dared admit out loud that they didn’t believe in God. So after misplacing my faith, I kept quiet.
I could hardly believe the loss myself. I kept returning to the place faith had been, prodding it like a sore tooth. How could this happen? I’d gone to Sunday school and church my entire life. I even went to church camp. I knelt every night as a child and asked God to bless a long list of relatives while glancing nervously at the prayer over my bed: “If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” I wasn’t afraid for my soul. It was the dying part that scared me. Who knew you could be snatched away while you slept?
In college, before taking the required Religion Class, I’d been devout enough to debate my aunt (who was also my English professor) about angles. We were reading Milton and she said when we die, we become angles. I said angles were another thing altogether, and the reason Milton put man above them was that we had the choice of being good or not. If we chose good, we were placed higher than the angles, who were heavenly beings and – except for the fallen ones – by nature good.
After she called our minister to check on this, she phoned my mother to say I was right. But, not wanting to show favoritism, she gave me a B in the class, which did not affect my belief in God, but definitely soured my belief in her.
To graduate from my Methodist college, you had to take a year of religion: one semester of Old Testament and one of New.
It was not the college’s intention to undermine our faith, but religion was taught as history. Who were those tribes? How did they come to worship one God, and how did the books we call the Bible get written and put together? This is where it happened – in the first semester among the begats.
I discovered that the Bible had come together over hundreds of years, written by different men in different times. Our textbook Bible contained the Apocrypha, the books that were once part of the Bible, but through one dispute or another had been cast out. To me, they sounded just as plausible as the official parts.
Doubt crept in like a poison, or maybe it was faith leaking out.
All I know is, during those months, as I read my chapters, took notes and wrote papers, belief gave way to logic God – at least the God I was kneeling to in church – was a construct, put together over centuries, codified, fought over, killed for, and what did we really know? Nothing, except we needed this story, needed to believe our soul went somewhere and that we didn’t blink out like light bulbs at the end.
I knew better than admit doubt. I continued to kneel in church and bow my head for grace during family meals. Was everybody pretending? At dinner, I opened my eyes a crack and peeked around. My sisters certainly looked pious enough. I never ask them what they believed for fear they’d ask me in return. If I told them the truth, they would shake their heads and say they’d miss me when they were in heaven with the angles and I was burning below.
I graduated, left home without admitting my faithlessness, and quit going to church. Now and then I can feel doubt pinching at my atheism, but I repress it. When you’ve tasted the forbidden fruit, there’s no going back to innocence, and no point being wistful about what you’ve lost.
---------------------------------------
Such a tragic story, one that is being played out thousands of times a day, all around the world. And who is at fault?- The Church.. By refusing to be honest with their constituents and would-be-constituents, they are driving away the very people they are trying to attract.

A minister friend of mine recently confided in me that at the annual conference of his church denomination he had had conversations with several of his colleagues regarding this problem. All admitted the problem exists but none are willing to ‘rock the boat’ or do anything about it.

So while the Universities, Colleges and Seminaries teach a modern, intellectually honest religion, the Church continues to preach an ancient folklore and superstition that is irrelevant to the 21st century worldview.

If nothing is done, and the trend continues, Christianity will soon find itself on the fringes of society, among the ignorant and uninformed.

Such a pity. The church… dying from its own lack of integrity.

barry e - 2009

An Ocean of God: The Interconnectedness of All Being

Excerpt from;
An Ocean of God: The Interconnectedness of All Being
By Rabbi Lawrence Kushner

It was almost ten years ago that one of my sons brought home what was then a new and sophisticated computer game. “It’s called ‘virtual reality,’ Dad,” He explained. “You play it by entering it. You must imagine that you are actually inside it You ask yourself, “What would I do if I really lived in this world?”

The game was called Myst. (They’ve since come out with a sequel called Riven.) You pop in the CD, look at the screen, and find yourself on an island. There’s a dock, a forest, buildings. Stairway. The graphics and sound effects are impressive and convincing. There is no manual, no instructions, no rules. You “go” places by aiming a little pointing finger and clicking. You can look up and down, turn around, climb stairs, wander all around the place. Where ever your curiosity leads you, there are things to discover and remember. There are machines you can operate, a library full of books you can actually open and read. Devotees say the game is properly played over weeks and months. (It’s been almost a decade and I still haven’t finished.)

And the purpose of it all? Why, of course: to figure out what you’re doing there. But to do that, you must first figure out how the place works.

What fascinates me here is not yet another sophisticated and clever way to waste time in front of the computer screen. (I can do that with Solitaire and FreeCell.) It is the concept of a game whose purpose is for the player to discover the purpose. Virtual reality, schmirtual reality, this ain’t no game. What’s going on here? Why am I here? What are the rules?

Upon hearing about this. A friend who is a professor of English suggested that it seemed a lot like childhood. I’d go further. It may be a lot like adulthood, too. We all find ourselves in “this world” and “object” seems to be to figure out what we’re doing here. Unfortunately, the way most things are connected to one another is not immediately apparent.

After all, meaning is a matter of connections. If something is connected to absolutely nothing – symbolically, linguistically, physically, psychologically – it is literally meaningless. And, if something is connected to everyone and everything, it would be supremely meaningful. I suppose it would be God: The One through whom everything is connected to everything else, the Source of all meaning. Religious traditions are the collected “rules of the game.” They presume to tell us how the world works. And if you “play by them,” you are rewarded (hopefully before it is time to leave) with an understanding of why you are here – with what is otherwise known as the meaning of life.

Bishop Spong Q&A 6/18/09

Jody Jones from Cedar Park, Texas, asks:

I recently attended your three lectures in Austin, Texas. You are an important person in my growth. I was raised as a fundamentalist, and you allowed me to begin and continue my journey. You mentioned prayer, and defined the prayers of most as "adult letters to Santa Claus." I must admit that it is an excellent definition. My question is this: What does prayer look like you to today? Thank you for continuing to educate.

Dear Jody,

I don't like to use the word prayer, because it is culturally translated as one person approaching the theistic God above the sky with a request. The word itself has become bankrupt and not capable of redemption.

Instead, I think of prayer as communing with the holy, that which is transcendental, the power of life, the consciousness of the divine, the Ground of Being or perhaps the source of love. I do not commune with God in order to seek divine favor or to engage in religious flattery that people call praise. I commune to discover God within me and to be more open to that presence. I do not separate prayer from life. I do not think prayer is something I do, so much as it is something I am.

Public worship has elements of liturgical prayer in it and I engage in public worship every Sunday. I believe the purpose of liturgy is to open us to the presence of the holy in the gathered community. I resent having medieval patterns of liturgy imposed on me, as if somehow plainsong music and priestly chanting creates holiness. To me it only creates irrelevant liturgy. I have written on prayer many times. I experience more in prayer than I can describe in words. That is as far as I can go.

I hope this helps.

– John Shelby Spong

Bishop Spong Q&A - Petitionary Prayer

Elmo Hoffman, via the Internet, writes:

I have read much of your work and met you once at Stetson University in Deland, Florida, at a pastor's conference. It was the same venue where I also met Marcus Borg. I am a retired civil trial lawyer and a late-life seminary graduate, now an ordained Disciples of Christ minister, although before seminary I was a lifelong Presbyterian (USA) from the same time frame and section of North Carolina as you. My question, which gives me a great deal of trouble, is: What is your basic understanding of petitionary prayer? I believe you have said, "A God who would save the life of one prayed-for cancer-stricken child and not another would be a monster." This makes sense but gives me a great deal of trouble in considering petitionary prayer. (I have read your book Honest Prayer — I find no answer to this problem there.)

Dear Elmo,

Thank you for your comments and for your question. Your question on petitionary prayer is almost always the first question that comes up wherever I go to lecture. People can talk about their understanding of God until the cows come home, but nothing really changes until they translate their understanding of God into their prayers. More than anything else, our prayers define our understanding of God. So to talk about prayer, we have to define who the God is to whom we pray. To say it differently, "Who do we think is listening?"

Most people, quite unconsciously, approach the subject of prayer with a very traditional concept of God quite operative in their minds. This God is a personal being, endowed with supernatural power, who lives somewhere outside this world, usually conceptualized as "above the sky." While that definition has had a long history among human beings, it is a definition of God that has been rendered meaningless by the advance of human knowledge. This means that for most of us the activity of prayer does not take seriously the fact that we live in a vast universe, and that we have not yet come to grips with the fact that there is no supernatural, parental deity above the sky, keeping the divine record books on human behavior up to date and ready at any moment to intervene in human history to answer prayers. When we do embrace this fact then prayer, as normally understood, becomes an increasingly impossible idea and inevitably a declining practice. To get people to embrace this point clearly, I have suggested that the popular prayers of most people is little more than adult letters written to a Santa Claus God.

There are then two choices. One says that the God in whom I always believed is no more, so I will become an atheist. People make this decision daily. It is an easy way out.

The other says that the way I have always thought of God has become inoperative, so there must be something wrong with my definition. This stance serves to plunge us deeply into a new way of thinking about God, and that is when prayer itself begins to be redefined. Can God, for example, be conceived of not as supernatural person, but as a force present in me and flowing through me? Then perhaps prayer can be transformed into meditation and petitionary prayer becomes a call to action. The spiritual life is then transformed from the activity of a child seeking the approval of a supernatural being to being a simultaneous journey into self-discovery and into the mystery of God. It also feeds my sense of growing into oneness with the source of all life and love and with what my mentor, Paul Tillich, called the Ground of All Being. It would take a book to fill in the blank places in this quick analysis, but these are the things that today feed my ever deepening discovery of the meaning of prayer.

– John Shelby Spong