Question: “Bishop Jack, is it an over simplification to suggest that extremism is the scourge of our time?… How is religion the path to so much good and also the path to so much evil?

See his answers here in The Weekly’s, complete, full-length interview with Bishop John Spong:

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“I grew up an evangelical fundamentalist in the heart of the Bible belt. According to my church segregation was the will of God and they quoted the Bible to prove.”

“I don’t live in a world where virgins conceive and where people can walk on water and where 5 lives are distributed to feed 5,000 people.”

“I am not interested in being part of a church that is kept together in homophobic unity.”

“Its not a surprise that people today and can quote the bible to justify almost any act of terror or any prejudice that they wish to engage in.”

“So, I felt a compelling need to challenge the negativity that was in the Christian faith that I grew up in and that I treasure today. When I read the Bible I see a very positive message, I don’t see a message of everybody wallowing in sin and needing to be rescued and saved.  I see a picture of people who are incomplete and who need to be empowered to live more fully and to love more wastefully and to have the courage to be all that they can be. The mark of the Christian, to me, is not making everyone agree with you but accepting people just like they are and walking together as brother and sister in the path that is set out before us. And if we can get people to see that God is not a noun that needs to be defined, and we have all these arguments about what God is, God is a verb that needs to be lived. Jesus says over and over again, I have come that you might have life and have it abundantly. He didn’t say, I have come so that you might be theologically correct.  I think we’ve got to get into a different place if were are going to appeal to the generation that is marked by my children and, today, my grandchildren.”

~Bishop John Shelby Spong

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Presented by Charlie Pickering along with Tom Gleeson and Kitty Flanagan, The Weekly is a half-hour news comedy exposing the humorous, the absurd and the downright hypocritical, 24/7, once a week. #TheWeekly