The Church is in the “guilt producing, control business”, it has created this fiery place which has quite literally scared the hell out of a lot of people – it’s part of a control tactic. Hell is an invention of the church and people don’t need to be born again, they need to grow up.
Had I said this people would not be in the least surprised. But the above words are of Bishop John Shelby Spong – yes I said “bishop”. Does he just have it all wrong or does this demonstrate that the church actually has a huge spectrum of beliefs that also range from right to left?
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Seriously though, this is brilliant..."
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Of course there’s a huge spectrum – it’s not a modern belief either. If you look up Irenaeus of Lyons, you’ll see the concept of Hell wasn’t a universal thing even in the early Church. It’s just we’re not as annoyingly loud as the fundamentalists, so you don’t notice us very often
Brilliant!
Spong isn’t exactly what one might call a fervent believer. Most christians (at least those in the USA) wouldn’t recognise his “beliefs” as anything approaching what they consider to be christianity.
Saying that, I rather like him and would prefer a profusion of his kind of christianity over that of so many others.
Well THAT was a shock. Thought you were just stating it as fact, which as you say, isn’t a surprise, or, actually, unreasonable. Nice to see a bish getting down with it too
Kilroy impersonating Interviewer looks HORRIFIED 
Bish sounds like a good guy.
Err… I thought everyone knew this?
Well, yes.
This is not news. John Paul II rejected literal Hell way back in 1999.
Christianity is (if you’ll forgive me) a broad church. Mainstream churches (Catholic and Protestant) gave Hell away a long time ago – only the madder outlier/fringe churches and the scarier American mega-churches still believe in it.
We (Christians) did work this one by ourselves, you know
“During his weekly address to the general audience of 8,500 people at the Vatican on July 28, 1999, Pope John Paul II rejected the reality of a physical, literal hell as a place of eternal fire and torment. Rather, the pope said hell is separation, even in this life, from the joyful communion with God.”
http://www.ovrlnd.com/Cults/poprejectshell.html
Well there are bound to be religious believers who believe that everyone will go to heaven no matter what.
I thought that’s what Jesus apparently died for in the first place?
Hell preaching priests suck.
Hell is the real-life sufferance that too many people endure due to the enforced policies of religious organisations every day all over the world.
It is also BBC3.
Um, so when Santa doesn’t bring me the presents I want, where does he go for punishment?
Well, that was a nice surprise. Decent bloke.
Ah, retired bishop (looked him up on wikipedia ofcourse).. too bad .. A few more of these type of thinkers around would not be bad .. for the transfer … at least, from what I read on wikipedia .. Most christians should want those in their church
Jesus spoke of Gehenna and why he spoke of it is a much different story than what most churches teach of. I guess we should thank the Roman Catholic Church for that one.
My kind of Bishop, wish there were more people in the Christian churches like this. I think the most powerful part is actually the excerpt of his sermon at the end.
Personal responsibility, make the most of your humanity people….
Be careful before you bash this. What he is saying makes sense. Religion is a pointer to god, it doesn’t define god. He isn’t going against religion.
Wise words, in my opinion.
Is Hull still real?
It was only the salvationary religions (ie: Christianity) that induced the concept of a Hell being a horrific place to be damned for eternity — in ancient Egypt there was always the threat of being thrown into the mouth of Ammit (part lion, hippopotamus and part crocodile), but there’s no record of it ever actually happening. In ancient Greece and Rome: Hades was a place you could voyage to, and return. In Judaism, the closest to hell that exists is Gehenna, a sort of waiting room where you can reflect on your life’s deeds for a maximum of 11 months.
Most people don’t realise that Heaven is hotter than Hell: http://home.clara.net/rod.beavon/random.htm
Worth a listen: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime_20061221.shtml
I’m certainly not going to Bash the Bish.
It’s easy to conclude that man invented god because he didn’t have science and then invented religions to control people.
Some people still need a “god”. Fair play to them.
Funny coincidence.
I said something pretty much identical to this title to someone last night… however, being me, it was a far more in depth ramble about some of the stuff I believe. I do try to refrain from discussions of this type, I mostly get disagreed with. But of course, everyone’s entitled their own opinion.
If you believe in an after-life (or if there is one) and you spend your life being mainly horrible to people … you will create your own hell.
Pax, amor et concordia.
x
Nice to hear someone outline the function of religion and its metaphorical nature eloquently, as well as highlighting the dangers of those who use it in a literal sense for material gain and power.
Spong…SPONG, you gotta be kidding
off I go spoing spoing spoing…
I think this guy is my new hero.
I’ve always appreciated the philosophies of religions for their psychological benefits, but not the control of religious organisations, from the catholic church to the church of scientology!
When a religion begins, it simply is that way and never changes, change only occurs when a schism breaks off the form a new religion, and the cycle continues. Maybe its time religions made progress (in their philosophy), like science does
Not the words I would expect to hearfrom a bishop, however what he is saying makes sense.
Religious moderates attempt to reconcile two unreconcilable schools of thought. I can only see this as an attempt to salvage religion from the inevitable decline in followers as common sense grows common.
I’d consider myself a fervent, Midwestern, American Christian, church every week and prayer groups and all that, and I think my beliefs fall pretty close to this bishop’s. “Hell” is a Norse word that the church wrapped up in a variety of medieval and Greek imagery and thrown a wide variety of ideas and texts from a variety of books in the New Testament at in order to control people.
I officiated a friend’s wedding this last weekend where I talked about a concept of Heaven on earth as a teaching of Jesus, not so much as an afterlife, but I even said I think people are going to raise form the dead someday and come live on earth. After the reception, we got into a conversation about Oujii boards, and I’pulled up the Derren’s video to show. So, the guy who believes in literal resurrection was the skeptic at the party. Funny world, eh?
It’s nice to hear Spong at first hand, and good to know he’s still out there doing his stuff. I’ve never understood why he remains in any sort of Church, but good luck to him. What he’s talking about in his sermon is more like a kind of humanist self-fulfilment. When he refers to “God”, I don’t know if it’s anything the average atheist would object to.
I put something very similar to that statement in my GCSE philosophy and ethics exam the other day
To be honest not a single one of us is ever going to find out until the day we all die……i believe alot of it has been man made so to speak, to make us all abide by societies ‘box’. As already stated alot of previous ancients had beliefs in their own versions of hell but fundamentally each hell was a horrific place you would not want to end up in so you were preached at to be good for your life in order to get where you want to go. Now i myself would love it if when we die we all end up in our own version of ‘heaven’ like the film What Dreams May Come because then i will spend eternity in a world of chocolate and be married to Al Pacino mmmmm now that’s my idea of heaven lol
Yes there is a wide group of people who call them self Christian. there are men such as Mr. Spong. There are Messianic Jews on the other end who strive for first century Christianity in the 21 century, for example Temple Aviv Judea, CA USA. ( I am not associated with this congregation. I just know that the rabbi publicly announced on the internet that he is open to answering question on the subject of Messianic faith.) And there are people such as my self who do not attend church but read the text and believe in god, but believe god gave us the capability to reason and we should use it.
If you get a chance please read his book “rescuing the Bible from fundamentalism” – it absolutely destroys the Bible from a historical / theological point of view, but eloquently explains how we got it in the first place- It’s lucid and rational and you end up scrtaching your head why anyone having read it would give up on such supersticious fairytales. .
I just wish he would go that one step further and become a spokesperson for the Atheist movement!
Yes, there are many Christians and church leaders, like Bishop Spong, who understand that God, at least not the God that Jesus believed in, would never ever torture anyone for a moment, much less prolong the pain for millions for ever. Too bad there are so many others who have been deluded into thinking they are following Jesus when, in fact, they are denying his core message about the nature of God and what that means for our present lives.
I’ve actually written an entire book on this topic–”Hell? No! Why You Can Be Certain There’s No Such Place As Hell,” (you can get a free ecopy of my book at my website: http://www.thereisnohell.com).
But as an example, in Luke 9:51-56, Jesus is very disappointed with his disciples for suggesting God burn some people to death. Surely he’d be very unhappy had they suggested burning people for eternity!
This man is a LEGAND =D