Ellen Hopkins Quotes

I love the idea of the teachings of Jesus Christ and the beautiful stories about it, which I loved in Sunday school and I collected all the little stickers and put them in my book. But the reality is that organised religion doesn't seem to work. It turns people into hateful lemmings and it's not really compassionate.

I believe alot of churches in America are not churches.

We worry a great deal about the problem of church and state. Now what about the church and God? Sometimes there seems to be a greater separation between the church and God than between the church and state.

The operation of the Church is entirely set up for the sinner; which creates much misunderstanding among the smug.” (August 9, 1955)

Just as the superstar pastor model can have its problems once the superstar pastor gets old or has a scandal or something, the house church model... there's a reason that the house churches of the New Testament era grew up into a more institutional faith down the road.

There's more than one mosque in the world that used to be a church and before that was a temple. Because it's a lot easier to just change the sign on the top and say under new management than it is to change the whole building.

That very church which the world likes best is sure to be that which God abhors.

But I contend that the disgusting behavior of many of their alleged 'holy men' relieves us of any intellectual obligation to take the stuff seriously. No amount of sanctimonious rationalization can make such behavior anything but pathological.

The further one separates himself from the precepts of the Christian Church, the further one distances himself from the truth. Only God can create. I make music from music.

We need to stop giving people excuses not to believe in God. You've probably heard the expression 'I believe in God, just not organized religion'. I don't think people would say that if the church truly lived like we are called to live.

The Roman Catholic Church is for saints and sinners alone - for respectable people, the Anglican Church will do.

Mystics are all a bit funny in the head anyway," the priest added cynically, "which is why the church locks them all up in mental hospitals and euphemistically calls these institutions monasteries.

Some make a conscience of spitting in the Church, yet robbe the Altar.

I love God and I follow Jesus but I just don't have much affinity for the organized folderol of the churches in the Western World.

Went to church but don't understand it, they underhanded. God gave me these commandments, the world is scandalous.

The churches that are most obviously democratic are most obviously given to race prejudice. I mean the churches that have absolute congregational control.

As the magistrate has no power to impose by his laws the use of any rites and ceremonies in any church, so neither has he any power to forbid the use of such rites and ceremonies as are already received, approved, and practised by any church; because if he did so, he would destroy the church itself; the end of whose institution is only to worship God with freedom, after its own manner.

Religion looks forward to the destruction of the world.... Perhaps half aware that its unsupported arguments are not entirely persuasive, and perhaps uneasy about its own greedy accumulation of temporal power and wealth, religion has never ceased to proclaim the Apocalypse and the day of judgment.

God has created the world in play, as it were.

Doubtless God Could Have Made A Better Berry, But Doubtless God Never Did

The Europeans have fallen away from religion and the church while the rest of the world is seemingly more religious. I don't know how to explain it.

... [ellipsis in source] it is true that the world was made in six days, but it was by God, to whose power the infirmity of men isnot to be compared.

The first step towards the evangelizing of the world is the christianizing of the church.

Doing good doesn't always make you feel good. I don't care what they tell you in church.