Well, its about time! It makes me wonder what else the Catholic Church knows it got wrong, and how long will it take to admit that?


http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/eu_vatican_astronomy

Merry Christmas to all! Even to you, patrask!

Christ is born! Glorify Him!

And may God bless us, everyone.

Ask the Bishop:

Q: I subscribe to your letters, and I have read most of your books and have found them helpful in my personal search for truth and in the search for my own identity as a Christian. I am 75 years old and retired from a busy practice of family medicine. I consider myself a second-commandment Christian.

On both counts, human suffering has been one of my primary concerns. Early on as a physician and caring human being, it seemed clear to me that, of all the causes of human tragedy and suffering, there was no greater cause than that of people having children they didn't want or couldn't take care of. Therefore, potentially we had no more effective weapon than family planning against it. So I became an advocate of family planning. In the mid 1960s, in Waukesha, Wisconsin, there was and still is a religious bias against birth control, and not just from Catholics. Vasectomies were not done openly in the state of Wisconsin, as they were considered both immoral and illegal, so I was referring my patients to a urologist in Rockford, Illinois. After determining that vasectomies were not illegal in the state of Wisconsin, and having failed to persuade my urologist colleagues to do them, against all advice and in the face of religious criticism I decided to do them myself. Over the next few years I did thousands of them, as many as ten between morning hospital rounds and noon. I carried a surgical kit and did them on the road. Within five years, the practice of vasectomies was accepted and widely practiced in the state of Wisconsin.

I continue to be an advocate of family planning. Based on polls taken by our local health department and my own experience, I believe the majority of people favor making contraception and sex education available to all women of childbearing age, including sexually active teenagers.

So my question is this: Why the deafening silence from our Christian churches — conservative, mainline and liberal — regarding this humanitarian issue? Why the absence of family planning from all organized religious outreach programs? I have interviewed pastors and elected officials and concluded that religious leaders fear being seen as condoning sexual promiscuity, and both elected and religious leaders fear being divisive. They both dodge the issue by touting education and economic development, already long accepted approaches to the problem of poverty. But come on, that's not the issue. It's easy to support popular charities. I've always liked this somewhat obscure quotation of Emerson's that might apply here. "Your goodness must have some edge to it."

You've never been afraid of controversy, so I'm interested in your take on this issue, particularly if you can think of ways to change the thinking of the broad Christian community in a way similar to the way it changed regarding the specific issue of vasectomies a half century ago.


A: What a terrific letter and what a powerful witness your life has made. Thank you for that.

The question you raised is daunting and powerful. Before trying to address it may I say that you are obviously part of the Christian Church, a "second-commandment Christian" as you call yourself — so the Church spoke loudly and eloquently through you.

What you are asking about is why institutional Christianity has been so silent on things like family planning. There are at least two things that I think can be said, not to excuse, but to help us to understand.

First, institutional Christianity has always been tied up over and repressive to issues of human sexuality. This stemmed from its move into a dualistic Greek thinking world in the second century that identified flesh and bodies with sinfulness while extolling souls and spirits so pure and holy. In time denying the flesh or the desires of the body came to be identified with Christianity. Later the Church declared that the holy life was the sexless life and so virginity was the pathway to holiness and celibacy was the mark of the holy or priestly life. A wide variety of negative things flowed out of this, including the negativity toward family planning, negativity toward a married priesthood, negativity toward women who were defined as "temptresses" if they were not virgins and the sense that sex was somehow dirty or unclean. For years women had to go through a ceremonial cleansing after childbirth before they could return to the Church. During the Middle Ages, cathedral choirs were normally made up of men and boys because menstruating women in the choirs might pollute holy places with their unclean menses.

I think it is also fair to say that institutional Christianity's negativity toward homosexual people and even the outbreak of priestly abuse of young boys that has drained the resources of many part of the Roman Catholic Church in paying off lawsuits is one more illustration that unhealthy and sometimes violent expressions of sexuality always result from the repression of healthy sexuality.

Once these negative attitudes are present in institutional Christian life, any attempt to change the cultural attitude is defined as immoral. So nations and states have made it difficult to oppose laws that when they were enacted reflected that distortion of the dominant religious perspective.

Today, efforts to teach sex education in public school are opposed by an unholy alliance of traditional Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestant fundamentalists. The current administration in Washington, bowing to the pressure of its "religious right" supporters, had advocated the teaching of abstinence instead of sex education. It has been a colossal failure, as statistics reveal. It has been about as effective in curbing sexual activity as the "Just say No" campaign was in controlling drug use. This administration has also refused to fund international family planning clinics around the world for the same reason.

Perhaps your letter will give people new courage to act. I do see a new day dawning in America on these and many other issues.

– John Shelby Spong

quote:

Originally posted by Doug Spaulding:
Ask the Bishop:


From Paul we learn that Jesus was crucified, that he introduced the Lord's Supper and that he was perceived as alive in some way following the crucifixion and little more.


– John Shelby Spong

This Bishop Spong is a total idiot.

There is absolutely no way to describe him in any other terms. Why?

Christianity rises or falls on one event. And that one event only is: Did Jesus come back to life in a physical body that lives forever. Did he ressurect?

And if he did not, the Gospels make it crystal clear: We are duped, and we are the greatest fools in all humankind. Christianity is a farce if Jesus did not rise from the dead.

Here Bishop Spong considers that one event as ... a mere possibility, take it or leave it.
This guy is a FRAUD!!!!

Ask the Bishop:

Q: Do you believe in heaven and hell, the blissful heaven and the burning hell? And do you believe in Jesus Christ as your personal savior?


A: Answering your two questions is impossible until some terms are defined and some explanations are given. When you define heaven as "the blissful heaven" and hell as "the burning hell," you reveal an evangelical mindset that asserts a particular understanding that you are requesting that I either affirm or deny. It is to bind the discussion to your frame of reference. That immediately suggests that you do not want real answers, you want affirmation. I cannot give you that nor would I be interested in doing so. With that background, however, let me proceed to respond. I think it would be fair to say that I do not believe in a blissful heaven or a burning hell as evangelicals define those terms. I do believe in life after death and shall try to explain both why and in what way in my next book, which is scheduled for publication in September of 2009.

You define heaven and hell as places of reward and punishment where God evens out life here on Earth. I regard that as primitive, childlike thinking that transforms God into a parent figure who delights in rewarding goodness and punishing sinfulness. This portrays God as a supernatural, judging figure and it violates everything I believe about both God and human life.

If anyone pursues goodness in the hope of gaining rewards or avoiding punishment, that person has not escaped the basic self-centeredness of human life and it becomes obvious that such a person is motivated primarily by self-interest. The Christian life is ultimately revealed in the power to live for others, to give ourselves away. It is not motivated by bliss or torment. Both of those images are little more than human wish fulfillment.

The fiery pits of hell are not an essential part of the Christian story. If one would take Matthew's gospel and especially the book of Revelation out of the Bible, most of the references to hell as a fiery place of torment would disappear. That is a quite foreign theme to Paul, Mark, Luke and John. Evangelicals never study the Bible deeply enough to make this distinction. They basically talk about a book they do not understand.

When you ask about "believing in Jesus Christ as your personal savior" you are using stylized evangelical language. That language has no appeal at all for me. To assert the role of savior for Jesus implies a definition of human life as sinful, fallen and helpless. It assumes the ancient myth that proclaimed that we were created perfect only to fall into sin from which we need to be rescued. It was a popular definition before people understood about our evolutionary background. We have been evolving toward humanity for billions of years. Our problem is not that we have fallen from some pristine perfection into a sinful state from which we need to be saved, it is that we need to be empowered to become something that we have never been, namely fully human beings. So the idea that I need a savior to save me from a fall that never happened and to restore me to a status that I never possessed is in our time all but nonsensical. It is because we do not understand the nature of human life that we do not understand the Jesus role. I see in Jesus the power of love that empowers us to be more deeply and fully human and so I do not know how to translate your questions.

Sorry, but the old evangelical language that you use is badly dated and I believe quite distorting to my understanding of what Christianity is all about.

– John Shelby Spong

quote:

Originally posted by Doug Spaulding:
Ask the Bishop:


From Paul we learn that Jesus was crucified, that he introduced the Lord's Supper and that he was perceived as alive in some way following the crucifixion and little more.


– John Shelby Spong

This Bishop Spong is a liberal heretic.

There is absolutely no way to describe him in any other terms. Why?

Christianity rises or falls on one event. And that one event only is: Did Jesus come back to life in a physical body that lives forever. Did he ressurect?

And if he did not, the Gospels make it crystal clear: We are duped, and we are the greatest fools in all humankind. Christianity is a farce if Jesus did not rise from the dead.

Here Bishop Spong considers that one event as ... a mere possibility, with a take it or leave it.
This guy is a FRAUD!!!!

One senses a "deja vu" with Mr Knox's posts, does one not?

When are you going to drive down from San Francisco and visit me (and Ray)?

quote:

Originally posted by Doug Spaulding:
One senses a "deja vu" with Mr Knox's posts, does one not?

Not "deju vu"! More like trying to pound some sense into your head: "If at first you don't succeed, try, try try again."

quote:

Originally posted by Phil Knox:
"If at first you don't succeed, try, try try again."

I admire your perseverance and your conviction in your faith. Really.

Stay strong!

Doug Spaulding. Stop the BS!! St. Paul in scripture is very clear that if the resurrection didn't occur, then our faith is in vain. (1st Corinthians, chapter 15).

How come that information hasn't gotten over to Bishop Spong? And you as well!

quote:

Originally posted by embroiderer:
Doug Spaulding. Stop the BS!!

I admire your perseverance and your conviction in your faith. Really.

Stay strong!

Thanks, embroiderer! Doug Spaulding refuses to accept what the scripture says pertaining to the resurrection or no resurrection.

Should we, then, say to him:
We admire your perseverance and your conviction in your darkness. Really.

quote:

Originally posted by Phil Knox:
Should we, then, say to him:
We admire your perseverance and your conviction in your darkness. Really.

If you must.