Just a test but this is Origen’s cool response to Celsus who claims Christianity is some forbidden secret society because they don’t have temples or statues of worship. I am reading the first chapter in response and Grok is quoting the next chapter in response below.

And here is the next chapter

Here’s the relevant passage from Origen’s Contra Celsum (Against Celsus), Book VIII, Chapter 17 (with related context from Chapters 19–20). This directly addresses Celsus’s accusation that Christians avoided building altars, statues (images), and temples — and that this avoidance was a “badge” or sign of a secret/forbidden/illegal society.

Origen’s Response (modernized and clarified English):

Celsus then proceeds to say that “we shrink from raising altars, statues, and temples; and this,” he thinks, “has been agreed upon among us as the badge or distinctive mark of a secret and forbidden society.”

To this our answer is: It is not true that we object to building altars, statues, and temples because we have agreed to make this the badge of a secret and forbidden society.
Rather, we do so because we have learned from Jesus Christ the true way of serving God, and we shrink from whatever, under a pretense of piety, leads to utter impiety those who abandon the way marked out for us by Jesus Christ.

We do not build lifeless temples to the Giver of all life. Instead, we are taught that our bodies are the temple of God, and that if anyone by lust or sin defiles the temple of God, he will himself be destroyed.

When people reproach us for not deeming it necessary to worship the Divine Being by raising lifeless temples, we set before them our temples — and show (to those who are not blind and senseless like their senseless gods) that there is no comparison between our statues and the statues of the heathen, nor between our altars (with what we may call the incense ascending from them) and the heathen altars with the fat and blood of victims; nor, finally, between the temples of senseless gods (admired by senseless men) and the temples, statues, and altars which are worthy of God.

Additional Context from Book VII (related defense):

Origen also explains the deeper reason Christians (and Jews) reject such things:

Christians and Jews have regard to the commands: “Thou shalt fear the Lord thy God, and serve Him alone,” and “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me: thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image…” and “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve.”

It is in consideration of these and many other such commands that they not only avoid temples, altars, and images, but are ready to suffer death when it is necessary, rather than debase by any such impiety the conception which they have of the Most High God.

This response is “really cool” because Origen flips the accusation: Christians aren’t hiding something illegal — they’re upholding a purer, spiritual worship of the invisible God, rejecting material idols that paganism used to “represent” the divine. He contrasts the “lifeless” pagan structures with the living “temple” of the human body and heart.