Free The Sins of Scripture by John Shelby Spong

accomplishment as building that mythical kingdom of God on earth, we looked again at our world and discovered that human life now seems to be quite vulnerable all over again. The conquered earth over which we today exercise dominion still has trump cards to play and in that fact lies a new challenge to our survival.
    We discovered that the chemicals we used to expand the capacity of the land to produce great quantities of grain and other foods are now showing up in the breast milk of young mothers and poisoning our infants. The salmon we farmed on our quick-growth plans is not now regarded as safe for a pregnant woman to eat, because it contaminates the unborn. There is a price to pay when profits are given a higher value than health. The antibiotics that we have used on cattle, sheep, hogs and chickens are now discovered to be lowering human immunity to the next generation of germs and viruses. The water that once seemed abundant is now both polluted and in short supply. Bottled water is today sold in supermarkets at a cost beyond what we pay for soft drinks or beer. The air we breathe is now making us sick in such numbers that health alerts about air quality are issued daily along with the weather reports. The fossil fuels we burn are giving us global warming and their increasing shortages are tilting inflation ever upward. No end is visible in these spiraling realities. Indeed, increasing demand for fossil fuels, clean air and pure water are undeniable.
    The developed nations of the Western world, by which I mean that belt that stretches across the northern hemisphere from Japan through Russia to Europe and on to North America, once had a monopoly on the resources we need to create the life of ease for our citizens. But today the world’s fastest-growing economies are in China and India, two nations that claim between them about 30 percent of the world’s population. One can only imagine the environmental disaster that will occur when the Chinese and Indians want to have the same percentage of automobiles, air conditioners, gas-fired appliances, telephones and computer terminals that are available in the United States today. Our excessive lifestyle in the developed nations has destroyed any moral ground we might have had to seek to hold developing nations to the standards our common environment might be able to absorb. Since we have no credibility and thus no ability to temper the coming disaster to the environment, our world will almost inevitably and relatively soon be pushed over the brink of destruction.
    Can this pending tragedy be averted? I see no way to achieve that hope without a limitation on human expansion. Once the supposedly divine command to “be fruitful and multiply” was seen as necessary to enable the human race to survive. Now it must be seen as nothing less than a prescription for human genocide. Once it was accepted as the “Word of God.” Now it must be viewed as a terrible and life-threatening text. Once we were able to see and embrace this terror primarily on the level of individual family tragedies. Our hearts ached at the pain endured by the McCourts in Ireland and the Yarnells in the southwestern United States. But now these family tragedies threaten to become global disasters. A text attributed to God and created to enable life to survive has become one of the sins of scripture that, if followed literally as the “Word of God,” all but guarantees our annihilation. A new way to read the scriptures becomes a crying, even a frantic need.
    The Word of the Lord to us can no longer be “Be fruitful and multiply.” We wonder if we can hear a new “Word of the Lord” that will save us from this pending disaster.

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THE VIRTUE OF BIRTH CONTROL
    Effective family planning has become a new moral imperative.
    James A. Pike 5
    T he most apparent fact about the public face of Christianity in recent history is that it is continually in conflict over issues of human sexuality. The battles being