"I admire our ancestors, whoever they were. I think the first self-conscious person must have shaken in his boots. Because as he becomes self-conscious, he's no longer part of nature. He sees himself against nature. He looks at the vastness of the universe and it looks hostile"
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Spong slips a theological argument into an evolutionary vignette: the “first self-conscious person” doesn’t receive a halo, he gets the shakes. That choice matters. It reframes religion not as revealed certainty but as an improvisation born the moment a mind steps back from the world and notices itself noticing. The admiration for “our ancestors, whoever they were” is a quiet swipe at tidy origin stories. He’s blessing the prehistory that doctrine often tries to fence off.
The engine of the quote is the pivot from belonging to estrangement. “No longer part of nature” isn’t biology; it’s psychology. Spong is describing the primal alienation that comes with reflective consciousness: the self as a separate object, suddenly standing “against nature” like a defendant before a cold bench. Once you can see yourself from the outside, the universe stops being home and starts being an arena. “Hostile” here isn’t meteor showers and predators so much as indifference. The cosmos doesn’t hate you; it just doesn’t care, and that can feel worse.
As a late-20th-century clergyman famous for liberal, post-literal Christianity, Spong is also positioning faith as a response to that vertigo, not a denial of science. The subtext is pastoral and provocative: if fear and isolation are the first religious emotions, then religion’s job is less about policing belief and more about helping humans live with the unbearable scale of reality without retreating into superstition.
The engine of the quote is the pivot from belonging to estrangement. “No longer part of nature” isn’t biology; it’s psychology. Spong is describing the primal alienation that comes with reflective consciousness: the self as a separate object, suddenly standing “against nature” like a defendant before a cold bench. Once you can see yourself from the outside, the universe stops being home and starts being an arena. “Hostile” here isn’t meteor showers and predators so much as indifference. The cosmos doesn’t hate you; it just doesn’t care, and that can feel worse.
As a late-20th-century clergyman famous for liberal, post-literal Christianity, Spong is also positioning faith as a response to that vertigo, not a denial of science. The subtext is pastoral and provocative: if fear and isolation are the first religious emotions, then religion’s job is less about policing belief and more about helping humans live with the unbearable scale of reality without retreating into superstition.
Quote Details
| Topic | Meaning of Life |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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