John Shelby Spong Quotes

We do not believe in the notion of God's chosen people. We laugh at this people's fancies and weep over its misdeeds. To act as God's chosen people is not only stupid and arrogant, but a crime against humanity. We call it racism.

God has taken his chosen people, the problem being you are the only non-chosen person.

I have a problem with religion that makes it so, like, 'We are the ones. We are the chosen ones.'

This is the snobbery of the people on the Mayflower looking down their noses at the people who came over ON THE SECOND BOAT!

The core of Animal House was about prejudice, about equality, and about inclusion/exclusion. It was about a group of people who were together and anything went. Anybody who wanted in could get it in. Then there was that other group that nobody could get in, unless they were white, and just alike. It was very representative of the culture in the '60s, '50s, and '40s in America.

People are more likely to help other people who look exactly like them. They will hang out at the bar and on the golf course with them.

It is natural anywhere that people like their own kind, but it is not necessarily natural that their fondness for their own kind should lead them to the subjection of whole groups of other people not like them.

The Hebrews took for their idol, not something made of metal or wood, but a race, a nation, something just as earthly. Their religion is essentially inseparable from such idolatry, because of the notion of the 'chosen people'.

In countries where there are no racial differences or no religious differences, people find other reasons to set aside one certain group of people and generally spit in their direction.

We have seen our discourse degraded by casual cruelty. At times, it can seem like the forces pulling us apart are stronger than the forces binding us together. Argument turns too easily into animosity. Disagreement escalates into dehumanization. Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples while judging ourselves by our best intentions.

If you think about it, there's not a religious group, there's not a nationalistic group, there's not a tribe, there is no grouping of people to my knowledge, of any consequence, who have not, at one or another time, been the object of hatred, racism, or who has not had people against them just because they were them.

People want to be with their own and want to be separated from others.

Whether it is tribalism, racism, xenophobia, or anti-Muslim backlash we're talking about, we spend so much time and energy fighting ways to divide ourselves from others.

I don't want to be elitist.

It makes me sad there is still some intellectual snobbery out there.

We don't properly discriminate. We never discriminate properly when we're dealing with another group and one of the big problems about religion is that religious people don't know that they are probably as flagrant in these misjudgments as irreligious people.

The intolerance of the few, or the risk of it, carries the day against the wider humanity of the many.

Intolerance of groups is often, strangely enough, exhibited more strongly against small differences than against fundamental ones.

I don't like the tendency on the part of so many people today to think that those who don't agree with them are bad. In fact, I find that very dangerous.

People are taking it for granted that [the Negro] ought not to work with his head. And it is so easy for these people among whom we are living to believe this; it flatters and satisfies their self-complacency.

It was the craving to be a one and only people which impelled the ancient Hebrews to invent a one and only God whose one and only people they were to be.

... the belief in a superstratum of human beings ... is the most evil of all beliefs. For when you say, 'I am not as other men' -- you have lost the two most valuable qualities we have ever tried to attain: -- humility and brotherhood.

So many Muslims would tell you that they felt like that you had to - you fold it into yourself because people were looking at you and recognizing you as being the culprit even though, look, I'm American. I don't believe that the teachings of Islam justified those actions.

We know the road of lack of recognition, of people telling us that we can't headline a movie because black women don't translate overseas, that every time we try to break the glass ceiling, people say no, people push back. And it's everything that people don't see out there.