Religion: One of the Biggest Crimes Against Humanity

 

 

Question :

Are you trying to destroy all of our previous ideas about religion?

 

 

There is no other way to be religious. All that you have heard about religion, read about religion, has to be totally dropped. Unless you are clean, with no writing on your consciousness, you will never know what religion is. The so-called religions are doing just the opposite. And you can see the result. The whole world is divided into religions: somebody is going to the synagogue, somebody is going to the temple, somebody else is going to the church. But do you find any religiousness anywhere?

 

Every child is brought up, conditioned, into a certain religion. It is one of the biggest crimes against humanity. Nothing can be a bigger crime than to pollute the mind of an innocent child by ideas which are going to become hindrances in his discovery of life. The moment you want to discover something, you have to be absolutely unprejudiced. You cannot discover religion as a Mohammedan, as a Christian, as a Hindu - no. These are the ways to prevent you from discovering religion. Every society, until now, has been trying to indoctrinate every child. Before the child becomes capable of asking questions, he is being given answers.

 

Do you see the stupidity of it? The child has not asked the question, and you are providing him with an answer. What you are doing in reality is killing the very possibility of the question arising. You have filled his mind with the answer. And unless he has his own question, how can he have his own answer? The quest has to be sincerely his. It cannot be borrowed, it cannot be inherited. But this nonsense has continued for centuries.

 

The priest is interested, the politician is interested, the parents are interested in making something of you before you can discover who you are. They are afraid that if you discover who you are, you will be a rebel, you will be dangerous to the vested interests. Then you will be an individual, living in his own right, not living a borrowed life. They are so afraid, that before the child becomes capable of asking, inquiring, they start stuffing his mind with all kinds of nonsense. The child is helpless. He naturally believes in the mother, in the father, and of course he believes in the priest in whom the father and mother believe. The great phenomenon of doubt has not arisen yet.

 

And it is one of the most precious things in life, to doubt, because unless you doubt you cannot discover. You have to sharpen your doubting forces so that you can cut through all rubbish and you can ask questions which nobody can answer. Only your own quest, inquiry, will help you to come to the realization of them. The religious question is not something which can be answered by somebody else. Nobody else can love on your behalf. Nobody else can live on your behalf.

 

You have to live your life, and you have to seek and search the fundamental questions of life. And unless you discover yourself, there is no joy, no ecstasy. If God is just given to you, ready-made, it is not worth anything, it is valueless. But that's how it is being done. What you call religious ideas are not religious, but only superstitions carried down the ages - so long, that just their ancientness has made them appear like truth.

 

Adolf Hitler, in his autobiography, My Struggle, makes many significant statements. The man was mad, but sometimes mad people say things which sane people are afraid to say. One of his most important statements is that, "any lie can become truth if repeated often, emphasized again and again, told by everybody from every corner." You go to the school and you hear about God and prayer. In the home you hear about God and prayer. You go to the temple and you hear about God and prayer. So many people - and just a small child against this whole mob. It is impossible for him to doubt - all these people are wrong?

 

And these are not the only people. Their parents, and their parents, for thousands of years, have been believing in these truths. They all cannot be wrong. "And I, a small child against this whole humanity..." He cannot gather courage. He starts repressing any possibility of doubt. And everybody else helps to repress doubt because, "Doubt is from the devil. Doubt is a great, perhaps the greatest sin. Belief is virtue. Believe and you will find; doubt, and you have missed on the very first step."

 

The truth is just the opposite. Believe and you will never find, and whatsoever you find will be nothing but the projection of your own belief - it will not be truth.

 

What has truth to do with your believing? Doubt, and doubt totally, because doubt is a cleansing process. It takes out all junk from your mind. It makes you again innocent, again the child which has been destroyed by the parents, by the priests, by the politicians, by the pedagogues. You have to discover that child again. You have to start from that point.

 

Hence, my whole effort here is to destroy all your so-called religious ideas. It will hurt you because those religious ideas have become so intimate to you that you have forgotten that they are not your discoveries, they are not your experiences. You have not lived them; you have not even loved them. Somebody else has forced you to believe in them, and whosoever has done it has committed an inhuman act against you.

 

I am not saying that those people are knowingly doing it. They are themselves victims of the same process. Their parents did it to them, their teachers did it to them. So I am not saying that you start feeling angry against them. They did it thinking it is good for you...but just by their thinking, anything is not going to become good - just by their thinking. They have been trying to help you, but they don't know that there are things in which a person should be left alone; only then can he discover. If you try to help him, you are crippling him.

 

Don't try to force anybody to take your help while he can manage on his own. Don't force anybody to see through your eyes, when he has eyes. And at least, please, don't place your specs on anybody's eyes; your numbers are different. You will drive that person blind. You will distort his vision. But not only specs are being put on you, people are putting their eyes on top of your eyes...and they are all doing it for your good, for your sake. And after twenty years, thirty years of continuous conditioning, you start forgetting that you had never asked the question in the first place.

 

I am reminded of a very creative person, Gertrude Stein. She was dying; her friends were around her. Suddenly she opened her eyes and asked, "What is the answer?" And the friends looked puzzled. Had she gone made just before death? Had she lost her reason? What kind of thing was she asking: "What is the answer?"

One of them said, "But you have not asked the question, so how can we say what is the answer?" So she said, "Okay then, tell me what is the question." And she died.

 

To me it is of tremendous significance. It relates to almost every human being. You have forgotten that you had not asked the question, and the answer has already been forced into you. And of course it is a simple process of conditioning...go on telling the person, go on telling the person the same thing again and again. Soon, the person starts repeating it like a gramophone record. And the person has forgotten that he had not asked the question. Perhaps at the very end Stein discovered her fresh childhood. It happens to many people when they are dying.

 

The circle completes, they come to the same point from where they had begun. So she is asking, "What is the answer?" because only answers were given. And nobody had bothered about the question. And when now, at this last moment, somebody asked, "But first tell us what is the question" she becomes aware...but now it is too late. And the answers have been so much, so heavy, such a load on the being, that now to ask an authentic question also has become impossible. So she asks, "Okay, if a question is needed, then I ask you, 'What is the question?'"

 

To me, this small incident is immensely significant. It is everybody's life. You talk about God, you talk about the soul, you talk about heaven, hell, but have you ever thought - are these questions? Are you really interested in God? What interest can you have in God? On what grounds can you have God become your quest? I was born in a Jaina family. In Jainism God is not believed in; there is no God, as creator. Because the conditioning of Jainism does not enforce the idea of God on its children, no Jaina child, or an old Jaina ever asks, "Who created the world?" Because they have been conditioned, from the very beginning, that the world exists from eternity to eternity; there is nobody who is a creator, and there is no need. Hence the question does not arise.

 

The Buddhist never asks the question, "What is God, where is God?" because Buddhism does not believe in God - so the child has been conditioned in that way. When you ask about God, you think that it is your question " it is not. You may have been born in a Hindu family, in a Christian family, in a Jewish family, and they have conditioned your mind that there is a God. They have given a certain image of God, certain ideas about God. And they have created you with such fear that to doubt is dangerous.

 

A small, tiny kid is being made afraid of the eternal hell where you will be thrown into fire, alive, and you will burn but you will not die. Naturally the doubt does not seem to be so significant to take such risk. And you are motivated that if you believe, simply believe, all pleasures, all joys of life are yours. Believe, and you are on the side of God; doubt, and you are on the side of the devil. The small child is bound to buy whatsoever crap you are giving him. He is afraid. He is afraid to be alone in the night, in the house, and you are talking about eternal hell: "You go on falling and falling into darkness and deeper darkness, and there is no end to it, and you can never come out of it."

 

Naturally the child simply shrinks from doubting, becomes so afraid that it is not worth it. And belief is so simple. Nothing is expected of you - just to believe in God, the son, the Holy Ghost...just to believe that Jesus is the son of God, and the messiah - and he has come to redeem the whole of humanity - and he will redeem you too. Why not be redeemed so cheaply? You are not asked much. Just believe, and everything will be settled in your favor. So why should you choose doubt? You should naturally choose belief.

 

And this happens at such a small age - and then you go on growing, and the belief and the conditioning and the ideas and the philosophy all go on top of it - that it is very difficult to dig and find out that there was a day when you were also full of doubt. But the doubt has been crushed, put out of sight. There was a day when you were reluctant to believe, but you have been persuaded. All kinds of rewards have been placed before you.

 

You can persuade a little child just by giving him a toy - and you have given him the whole paradise. If you have succeeded in persuading him to believe, you have not done a great miracle. It is very simple exploitation. Perhaps you are doing it unknowingly; you have also been passed through the same process. And once you close the doors of doubt you have closed the doors of reason, thinking, asking, inquiring. You are no more really a human being. The doors of doubt closed, you are just a zombie, hypnotized, conditioned, persuaded out of fear, out of greed, to believe in things which no normal child is going to believe, if all these things are not arranged.

 

And once you stop doubting and thinking, then you can believe anything whatsoever. Then there is no question. The politician wants it, because if you are a believer in a certain religion you are gullible. That shows your gullibility. It is enough indication. If you go to the church, it is enough indication that you are not a man who thinks, who questions, who argues, who will not take anything unless it is proved logically, rationally, scientifically. You go to the synagogue, you go to the mosque - the politician is happy. He wants everybody to go to the synagogue, to the mosque, to the church...it does not matter where you go, but go - because they all do the same.

 

The basic structure, the strategy, is not different. Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, Jew, it does not matter, because the basic strategy is exactly the same: close the doors of doubt completely, don't take any chances, don't leave any question marks in the person, and fill his mind with all kinds of beliefs. If you look at beliefs you will be surprised. People have believed any nonsense. If you give freedom to every child, they can make your popes and your imams and your monks just look absolutely idiotic. In the category of idiots they can put them. Just your children...nothing is needed, if you allow them to doubt.

 

But they are not allowed to doubt. And once you become accustomed to a belief, it slowly, slowly poisons your whole being. Then if somebody is attacking it, it feels as if he is attacking you. That has been my trouble. My whole life I have been attacking. Unless I attack your belief system, your ideology, I cannot be of any help to you; I cannot share myself with you. There is a wall, a thick wall. I can go on shouting; you will not hear me.

 

I have to hit the wall continuously, hammer it, at least make a hole in it, so I can see you, you can see me - face to face. And I can revive what has been taken away from you. I can give you back your innocent childhood, and only from there a real inquiry into truth begins. Only from there, religion is possible. Otherwise you can only talk about religion.

 

-Osho, "From Unconsciousness to Consciousness,  #13, Q1"