Excerpt #84 from my book, Religion, An Obstacle to Human Progress
The former Anglican bishop of Newark, John Shelby Spong believes the time has come for intelligent Christians to grow up and admit there isn’t a personal God of any kind on the receiving end of prayers and petitions.
“Theism,” writes Spong, “as a way of defining, is dead.”
He adds, “Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.”
Traditionalists will jeer him, says Spong, just as they attacked Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and Freud.
“History has come to a point where only one thing will save this venerable faith tradition at this critical time in Christian history, and that is a new Reformation far more radical than Christianity has ever before known.
“This Reformation will recognize that the pre-modern concepts in which Christianity has traditionally been carried will never again speak to the post-modern world we now inhabit.
“This Reformation will be about the very life and death of Christianity,” Spong writes.
Spong says it’s “nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity.”
He rejects miracles, humanity’s fall into sin, and any belief that the Bible contains revealed, transcendent moral laws.
He rejects the virgin birth, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus as historical events.
Spong writes: “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.”
He adds: “The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment.”
So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence. – Bertrand Russell
The Bible is a mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology. – Mark Twain
‘Mythology’ is what we call someone else’s religion. – Joseph Campbell
A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes. – James Feibleman
A cult is a religion with no political power. – Tom Wolfe