John Shelby Spong Quotes

We can learn to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about gay people. The same way we have learned to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about shellfish, about slavery, about dinner, about farming, about menstruation, about virginity, about masturbation.

If enough people openly engage in conduct once considered reprehensible, we rewrite the rule book and assume that God, as a good democrat, will go along.

Things change so fast, you can't use 1971 ethics on someone born in 1971.

History requires us to judge the figures of the past not by our moral standards but by those of the ages in which they lived and worked.

The moral code which was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for our children.

The ideas of right and wrong change with the experience of the race, and this change is wrought by the gradual ascertaining of consequences - of results.

Keep in mind that this appears in the same book of the Bible that approves the death sentence for a child who curses his parents, owners of oxen who injure someone through the owner's negligence, anybody who works or kindles a fire on Sunday, and anyone who has sex with an animal.

Custom ... changes the very nature of things; and what was honorable a thousand years ago, may probably be looked upon as infamous now.

A hundred years ago Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter was given an A for adultery; today she would rate no better than a C-plus.

Morality is the thing upon which your friends smile, and immorality is the thing upon which they frown

Liberalism has become a moral vaccine that immunizes people against stigmatization.

The so-called new morality is too often the old immorality condoned.

The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time.

In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking. Now, Heaven knows, anything goes. The world has gone mad today, and good's bad today, and black's white today, and day's night today.

I'm offended by the is-ought fallacy, which has been used to justify slavery, women not being allowed to vote, children working in factories.

Virtue, my pet, is an abstract idea, varying in its manifestations with the surroundings. Virtue in Provence, in Constantinople, in London, and in Paris bears very different fruit, but is none the less virtue.

One man's pornography is another man's theology.

I don't think God will continue to bless America if we continue to kill 1.2 million children every year.

To claim that theft or adultery or lying are "evil" simply reflects our degraded idea of good-—that it has something to do with respect for property, respectability, and sincerity.

I was born in the middle of World War II, the middle of the Holocaust; I was born when there was no declaration of human rights, when feminism was not an issue, when children were working in factories. I mean, today's world is a better place!

If anyone had told us in 1945 that there are certain battles we'll have to fight again we wouldn't have believed it. Racism, anti-Semitism, starvation of children and, who would have believed that? At least I was convinced then, naively, that at least something happened in history that, because of myself, certain things cannot happen again.

In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing. And when you destroy that you have a dramatic impact on the quality.

Individualism has really the higher aim. Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one's age.

Human rights are not the preserve of Western activists: The definition must extend to encompass the right to the dignified life; the right to send your kids to school, for that child to get health care, for access for greater prosperity for generations to come and to have a say in the destiny of your community and country. Under that definition, Rwanda has nothing to learn from advocacy groups who think they own the copyright on what constitutes human rights under all conditions in every corner of the world.

Morality, then, is not a set of arbitrary regulations dictated by a vengeful deity and written down in a book; nor is it the custom of a particular culture or tribe. It is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games.