We have, in fact, two kinds of morality side by side; one which we preach but do not practice, and another which we practice but seldom preach.
3rd Earl Russell of Kingston
We talk much more about individualism and liberty than our ancestors. But as so often happens, when anything becomes conscious, the consciousness is compensatory for absence in practice.
That very church which the world likes best is sure to be that which God abhors.
We're all hypocrites. We all say one thing and do another. But why don't we try to do what we say more than what we don't?
Men are not flattered by being shown that there is a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them.
They have otherwise no Religion: when we pray, they laugh at us; some of them despise it entirely, and some when we tell them what we do when we pray, stand astonished. When we have a Sermon, sometimes ten or twelve of them, more or less, will attend, each having a long Tobacco Pipe, made by himself, in his mouth, and will stand a while and look, and afterwards ask me what I was doing and what I wanted, that I stood there alone and made so many Words, and none of the rest might speak? I tell them I admonished the Christians, that they must not steal, ... get drunk, or commit Murder, and that they too ought not to do these Things, and that I intend after a while to preach to them, ... They say I do well in teaching the Christians, but immediately [ask] why do so many Christians do these Things.
Although readers and viewers tell us that they do not want this filth, that is exactly what they read and tune in to.
You need to identify the values that come out of that kind of belief system, because I don't see them. All the polls I look at say, for example, that adultery is committed as much in the Bible Belt as in any other part of the country. The same goes for abortion, child abuse, spouse abuse or murder.
Love of God is not always the same as love of good.
[To a priest who smoked:] What a shame for a man to dress like a saint and smell like a devil!
Fine words dresse ill deedes.
Do as we say, and not as we do.
Where it gets weird is that nowadays there are millions of people on this earth who call themselves followers of Jesus, but their lives look nothing like His, and they're not obeying the things that He called them to do.
It's in our ability to selectively engage and disengage our moral standards, and it helps explain how people can be barbarically cruel in one moment and compassionate the next.
History is the chronicle of divorces between creed and deed.
The teaching of Christ, as it appears in the Gospels, has had extraordinarily little to do with the ethics of Christians.
Mere heathen morality, and not Jesus Christ, is preached in most of our churches.
One would like to believe that people who think of themselves as devout Christians would also behave in a manner that is in according with Christian ethics. But pastorally and existentially, I know that this is not the case, and never has been.
One cannot be aware both of the history of Christian war and of the contents of the gospels without feeling that something is amiss.
Man represses the irrational passions of destructiveness, hate, envy, revenge; he worships power, money, the sovereign state, the nation; while he pays lip service to the teachings of the great spiritual leaders of the human race, those of Buddha, the prophets, Socrates, Jesus, Mohammed-he has transformed these teachings into a jungle of superstition and idol-worship. How can mankind save itself from destroying itself by this discrepancy between intellectual-technical overmaturity and emotional backwardness?
If only Jesus' followers shared his personality. That one shift alone would correct so many of the ridiculous and horrifying things that pass for popular Christianity.
It is extremely unfortunate that an editor's own life and practice should be notoriously at variance with his written principles.
I'm not a righteous man. People put me up on a pedestal that I don't belong in my personal life. And they think that I'm better than I am. I'm not the good man that people think I am. Newspapers and magazines and television have made me out to be a saint. I'm not. I'm not a Mother Teresa. And I feel that very much.
I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.
The nearer to the church, the further from God.
