Every now and then, a prominent religious figure says something that is so jaw-droppingly stupid, so ignorant, and so inexplicable in a literate person that all you can do is stand back and admire the incredible awesomeness of it. Such a statement appears in this week’s Washington Post “On Faith” column in response to this question:
According to a new Pew survey, 21% of American atheists believe in God or a universal spirit, 12% believe in heaven and 10% pray at least once a week. What do you make of this?
The response comes from–wait for it–John Shelby Spong, the retired atheist who used to traipse around in fancy duds for the Episcopal Diocese of Newark:
The problem with this question is in the definition of an atheist. Literally, that word means “not to believe in a theistic deity.”
Theism is attached to the concept of an external, supernatural deity, who intervenes in human history to accomplish some divine purpose or to answer prayers. In the light of the work of Galileo, who made the theistic God above the sky homeless, and Isaac Newton, who rendered the theistic God to be unemployed, theism has come on bad days. [Emphasis added.]
Theism, however, is not God; it is a human definition of God that is dated and inadequate. Professional theologians hardly ever talk about a theistic God, yet none of them are atheists in the sense of asserting that there is no God. [Emphasis added.]
Glory in the world-class, Olympic-level imbecility that comes from combining those two emphasized sentences. According to Spong, “professional theologians hardly ever talk about” an “external, supernatural deity, who intervenes in human history to accomplish some divine purpose or to answer prayers”
I loved my wife’s response to this: “what do they talk about? Their bowling scores?” Me, I consider this to be a spectacular example of what I call the maggot’s eye view of the world. That’s what you get when all you can see is rotting garbage. Or, to put it another way, when the only “theologian” you ever read is yourself.
Posted by David Fischler 
