{"id":187948,"date":"2011-01-19T22:02:00","date_gmt":"2011-01-20T03:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2011\/01\/19\/bishop-john-shelby-spong-is-right\/"},"modified":"2011-01-19T22:02:00","modified_gmt":"2011-01-20T03:02:00","slug":"bishop-john-shelby-spong-is-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2011\/01\/19\/bishop-john-shelby-spong-is-right\/","title":{"rendered":"Bishop John Shelby Spong Is Right\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>He asks the question, &#8220;Has religion in general and Christianity in particular degenerated to the level that it has become little more than a veil under which anger can be legitimatized?&#8221; (See <a href=\"http:\/\/40yrs.blogspot.com\/2007\/09\/understanding-religious-anger.html\">here<\/a>)<\/p>\n<p>My answer is &#8220;yes&#8221;, and that you could also add bigotry to that list, as evidenced by the Governor of (where else) Alabama, who, while declaring that he was colorblind, said that,  &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.politico.com\/blogs\/bensmith\/0111\/Colorblind_among_Christians.html\">So anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I&#8217;m telling you, you&#8217;re not my brother and you&#8217;re not my sister<\/a>,&#8221; though to be fair, he <a href=\"http:\/\/abcnews.go.com\/US\/alabama-gov-robert-bentley-apologizes-christian-comments\/story?id=12662495\">Robert Bentley has since apologized<\/a>, though with the classic, &#8220;I&#8217;m sorry if I offended anyone,&#8221; apology, which actually puts the onus on those who object.<\/p>\n<p>There are people who use religion to fulfill a basic spiritual need, but I think that there are a lot more people who find it useful way to feel better than other people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>He asks the question, &#8220;Has religion in general and Christianity in particular degenerated to the level that it has become little more than a veil under which anger can be legitimatized?&#8221; (See here) My answer is &#8220;yes&#8221;, and that you could also add bigotry to that list, as evidenced by the Governor of (where else) &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[967,1009,978,1021],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-187948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bigotry","category-government","category-politics","category-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187948"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187948\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}