John Shelby Spong said...

Bishop Spong: First you need to develop an understanding of God other than the supernatural parent figure who lives above the sky and is waiting to come to your aid. Christian prayer is not an adult letter to Santa Claus. Second, you need to understand the nature of the world in which you and I are living. It is not a world of miracle, magic and divine intervention, but a world of order, natural law and precise mathematical formulas that enables us to predict with total accuracy the tides, the time of sunrise and sunset and even eclipses of the sun and moon. We can send spacecraft to the moon and to the planets as far out as Jupiter because we know the laws by which such things as motion and gravity operate. Prayer must take place in that kind of world.