Ruth Hurmence Green Quotes

A Boss in Heaven is the best excuse for a boss on earth, therefore If God did exist, he would have to be abolished.

I always distrust people who know so much about what God wants them to do to their fellows.

[priests are] the pretenders to power and dominion, and to a superior sanctity of character, distinct from virtue and good morals.

Religion has been a powerful weapon in the hands of governments, in the hands of priests, in the hands of kings who have used it as a weapon to keep down the populace. It is a wonderful way of disciplining people and making them do what you want, to tell them that if they don't do what you want they will, for example, go to Hell.

No one has the right to tell me what to do because he has a divine warrant.

The nice thing about citing god as an authority is that you can prove anything you set out to prove.

The notion that the 'leader' has the right to ask huge sacrifices of your generation for a notional future paradise - if you'd be good enough to lie down under the wheels of the juggernaut - that sentimental and self-aggrandising rationalisation for brute force and cowardice I felt from adolescence was wrong.

Any number of scoundrels, having money enough to start with, can establish themselves as a 'government'; because, with money, they can hire soldiers, and with soldiers extort more money; and also compel general obedience to their will.

We have used the Bible as if it were a mere special constable's handbook, an opium dose for keeping beasts of burden patient while they are overloaded.

Aggression is simply another name for government.

Power intoxicates men. It is never voluntarily surrendered. It must be taken from them.

In order to the existence of such a ministry in the Church, there is requisite an authority received from God, and consequently power and knowledge imparted from God for the exercise of such ministry; and where a man possesses these, although the bishop has not laid hands upon him according to his traditions, God has Himself appointed him.

When state and religion are one, religion becomes a means for the powerful to remain in power.

The Sword and its law have existed from the beginning of the world. The use of force can never prevent heresy.

To arrive at the truth in all things, we ought always to be ready to believe that what seems to us white is black if the hierarchical Church so defines it.

Nothing overshadows truth so completely as authority.

In all ages hypocrites, called priests, have put crowns on the heads of thieves, called kings.

Necessity, the tyrant's plea.

Power tends to confuse itself with virtue, and a great nation is particularly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God's favor.

Crown and cloth maken no priest, nor emperor's bishop with his words, but power that Christ giveth; and thus by life have been priests known.

With God on their side, Christians have no need for majoritarian politics, or for compromise and accomodation to reach their goal.

People who are in a position of power like to throw their weight around, and that becomes abuse.

Even the most humane and compassionate of the monotheisms and polytheisms are complicit in this quiet and irrational authoritarianism: they proclaim us, in Fulke Greville's unforgettable line, "Created sick Commanded to be well." And there are totalitarian insinuations to back this up if its appeal should fail.

And also those to whom these commandments were given, might have power to lay the foundation of this church, and to bring it forth out of obscurity and out of darkness, the only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth.

The garb of religion is the best cloak for power.