[sionnsar]

[Haven't the faintest idea what "Dawson's Creek" is, except that it sounds like a teeeveee show, and I rarely turn on the teeeveee anymore. --sionnsar]

[sionnsar]

Traditional Anglican ping, continued in memory of its founder Arlin Adams.

FReepmail sionnsar if you want on or off this list.
This is a moderately high-volume ping list (typically 3-7 pings/day).

Resource for Traditional Anglicans: http://trad-anglican.faithweb.com

Please read a blogger's Thoughts on Amiable and Constructive Dialogue

[jwalburg]

I used to get daily Bible readings from beliefnet.com. But the Spong banner ads on the side were increasingly creepy, so I stopped.

[PAR35]

So this is the Spongian doctrine of humanity: we are nothing but rutting animals, devoid of reason or free will, unable to control our passions,

Perhaps Sprong is turning into a one - point Calvinist. He seems to recognize the total depravity of man. Now if he could just learn about regeneration and sanctification....

[xJones]

The retired Bishop of Newark is a prime example of what went wrong with ECUSA. Like the late Episcopalian Bishop Pike, he is glib, pompously self-righteous, craves and lives for media attention, and his version of Christian theology could be shot through with a spit ball.

Spong. isn't even a Christian, if one defines Christinity by belief in the faith taught in the Bible, but ECUSA has never tossed that non-Christian out and he still receives his pension.

"The issues to which I now call the Christians of the world to debate are these:

1. Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. So most theological God-talk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found.
2. Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.
3. The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.
4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.
5. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.
6. The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.
7. Resurrection is an action of God. Jesus was raised into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.
8. The story of the Ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age.
9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard writ in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.
10. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.
11. The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.
12. All human beings bear God's image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one's being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.

So I set these theses today before the Christian world and I stand ready to debate each of them as we prepare to enter the third millennium."

Why is the Bible completely wrong? Because Spong says so, based on the name-calling of famous scientists, whose works he never could comprehend, but he certainly knew their names.

[valkyrieanne]

"Over the last 500 years, we've lowered the age of puberty [an amazing act of control over human evolution, wouldn't you say?] and raised the age of marriage," Spong says in a phone interview from his New Jersey home. "We've created a space of 10-15 years."

Hmm. This raises some interesting mathematical possibilities. One is that puberty takes place at 12 and people can't get married until they are 22-27 years old. But I don't know of any jurisdictions in America where that's the case. People can marry with parental consent as young as 13 (girls in New Hampshire) or without parental consent as young as 15 (in Mississippi).

Criticize Spong's theology and morality if you wish, but his biology is spot on. Girls mature *far* faster now than they did in the past. It is not unusual for girls to start puberty at age 8-9 and have their first cycle at age 9-10. This *is* a function of human evolution, because those groups with the lowest ages of puberty are proportionately having more children.

Historically, girls married very young, at 13-15 (usually a year after their periods began.) When life expectancies were 30 years, that made sense, and in that sense our biology *was* consistent with our social mores.

As far as jurisdictional ages of marriage, parents are not going to *permit* their children to marry at 16, and it wouldn't matter anyway, because they can't financially support themselves.

[Gal.5:1]

Spong is wrong.

[F16Fighter]

The one-time "Bishop" Spong and now pied piper of heresy is the hope of every misguided fellow heretic who craves assurance they won't "burn in hell."

Spong is possessed. Literally.