Sannyas a training for rebellion

Are you preparing us to be warriors, fighting for the right to be individuals in a society which labels truth as lies, and calls lies the truth?

I have just read David Yallop’s book, ‘In God’s Name’ , in which he clearly lays out the role of the Roman Catholic church in murder, terrorism, embezzlement, drug running, and major and continuing swindling of incredible sums of money; manipulation of politics in America, Italy, South America, Poland… The list is as impressive as it is far from the message of the carpenter from Nazareth. Will you please comment?

Devageet, David Yallop’s book is a tremendous contribution towards understanding the murderous instinct of the Catholic church. The same is needed to be done about every religion – because they all are doing the same thing, more or less. Perhaps the Catholic church is the best example because it is the most organized religion in the world, and the greatest in numbers – seven hundred million people are Catholics.

And that religion has committed every crime that you can imagine. It has burned thousands of women alive, by fictitiously labelling them as witches. There is no devil anywhere, and there are no witches anywhere. But these women were chosen to be destroyed because they were competitors to the Catholic religion. They were carrying the older and more ancient tradition of the days when the world was pagan. They were nature worshippers.

And for Catholicism that is the worst crime – because that means there is no need of a God, nature is enough. There is no need of a Jesus Christ as a saviour, because nobody is drowning. And there is no need for the Catholic priests and their confessionals, because nature knows nothing as sin.

These women were burned alive because they were pagans. But just to burn them because they were pagans was not enough of an excuse. They had to be condemned in such a way that their being burned alive could be supported rationally. First, they were tortured for days together: special mechanisms were invented to torture them.

When, six years ago, I had a bad back and I was in tremendous pain, the doctors brought a small mechanism; they call it traction. It pulls you – your legs in one direction, your hands in another direction – to fix your backbone. I asked the doctors, “Do you know who has invented this machine?” They were not aware.

It was invented by the Catholic church to torture the so-called witches. Sometimes their legs would come off the body; sometimes their hands would come off the body. It was just a coincidence that one woman who was suffering from a bad back for years, and nothing had been of any help… when she was tortured on this mechanism, she was amazed – her back pain disappeared. So the traction machine is a contribution of the Catholic church, and later on it moved to the hospitals.

And after a week or two weeks of continuous torture – no food, beating, not allowing them to sleep – the women, in a kind of helplessness, finally confessed. Because unless they would confess, the torture would continue. So what was the point? You could not escape.

The church was very powerful; it was not only the religion, it was also the government. It had all the powers of religion and all the powers of the government, of the state; so whatever they asked, the women confessed. The priests dictated the confession. They told them that they had to confess that they were having a sexual relationship with the devil – with full details.

And they had to confess it in the court. The full details were given to them – that the devil has a forked penis, not an ordinary penis. Forked, so that he could enter the woman from both her entries simultaneously. And those poor women had to confess in the court, and then the court ordered them to be burned alive because they had committed the gravest sin.

The church’s power has remained, although its state power has shrunk to eight square miles in the Vatican. But it is still a kingdom – an independent nation. And the pope is also the head of a state. Right now the manager of the Vatican’s bank is in hiding, because the Italian government has an arrest warrant against him. But they cannot enter the Vatican, it is an independent country – and his crimes have been found to be great.

The pope runs perhaps the greatest mafia in the world. And the pope’s bank in the Vatican turns all the income from drugs into legitimate money – the black money into white, millions of dollars per week. And the head of the bank is now being sought by the Italian government. There is an unbailable arrest warrant, and the police are waiting around the Vatican for him. But the pope has rewarded him, he has been made a cardinal; he was only a bishop.

The pope has been spending money on his world tours as no other pope has ever done before. Just a few months ago, in Australia, he spent more on his tour than the queen of England did when she went there. Almost every year he has been spending millions of dollars for his worldwide tours. And all this money comes from heroin and other drugs.

It is strange how blind humanity is. And these people go on speaking beautiful words; they preach against drugs, yet their whole empire depends on drugs! They condemn everything which they themselves practice. They condemn homosexuality, and almost fifty percent of Catholic priests are homosexuals. This is a very conservative estimate; the percentage is probably more than that. What to say about the monks in the monasteries?

One of the predecessors of this Polack pope was himself a homosexual. Before becoming a pope he was a cardinal in Milan. He had a boyfriend, and it was the talk of the town. Then he became the pope, and the first thing he did was to appoint his boyfriend as “secretary to the pope.” The whole world knew that he was a homosexual. The Catholic church is against homosexuality, and the head of the church is a practitioner of homosexuality! – absolute dishonesty, insincerity.

Millions of people have been killed in the name of religion and God in the crusades, jihads and other religious wars. David Yallop’s book, In God’s Name, is a great contribution, “in which he clearly lays out the role of the Roman Catholic church in murder, terrorism, embezzlement, drug-running, major and continual swindling of incredible sums of money; manipulation of politics in America, Italy, South America, Poland….”

Recently the pope declared that the church should not take part in any kind of politics; that Christian priests, monks, bishops, and cardinals should remain beyond politics. And while he was saying all this, he was sending millions of dollars to a political party in Poland to fight against communism.

These people have so many faces! If you are not to take part in politics, then why should you be interested in the communist party not remaining in power in Poland? And where did you get millions of dollars to support the opposition?… from drugs.

But this is not new. This has been going on since the crucifixion of Jesus. If that poor carpenter’s son had known that this is what was going to be the ultimate result of his teachings, Jews would not have been needed to crucify him; he would have committed suicide himself!

What David Yallop has done for the Catholic church should be done for all religions: a deep research into their workings. And you will not find them less criminal than the Catholics.

Look at what happened to Buddhists. Gautam Buddha was born in India; his impact was so tremendous that almost the whole country was under his influence and millions of people became Buddhists. But once he was dead, what happened to those millions of Buddhists? They were murdered, they were burned alive, they were driven out of the country. The whole of Asia is now Buddhist, because those people who escaped India just to save their lives reached China, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Burma, Japan, Sri Lanka – they moved all over the Far East. So the whole Far East is Buddhist – but not India.

And in India there has not been a single Buddhist for twenty-five centuries. They could not simply evaporate – such a tremendous movement. But because it was against Brahminism, against Hinduism, Hindus could not tolerate it, Brahmins could not tolerate it. It was destroying their whole profession, because Brahmins have lived like parasites on people – they don’t do anything except religious rituals. And Buddha was against all religious rituals; he was against the Vedas, which are full of nonsense.

While he was alive, the Hindus remained silent, because there was no argument to defeat him; what he was saying was so clear, so right and so timely, that it was impossible to have any confrontation. But once he was dead, there began a tremendous butchery against the Buddhists.

The same has happened against the Jainas. But nobody can say anything against these killings because the government immediately interferes – under the pretext of “not hurting anybody’s religious feelings.” This is strange. People are murdered, and you should not say anything about it. Hence, there is not a single book in India comparable to David Yallop’s book, because the government has to look to the voters, and the Hindus constitute the majority of voters.

Nobody has written a history of what Mohammedans have done to Hindus or Jainas while they were ruling India; how many beautiful temples they destroyed, how many millions of art pieces which represented centuries of work. They have destroyed the statues, the temples. Nobody knows how many women they have raped, how many men they have forced to either be Mohammedans or to die. Because not all Mohammedans that are in India have come from Arabia – many are converted people. And they were converted on the point of the sword, not by any intellectual conviction, not by proving that Mohammedanism is better than their religion. Mohammedans have used the sword as their only argument.

But not a single book exists to tell the story of continuous murder and rape for almost fifteen centuries; because Mohammedans are the second majority – again the government is interested in their votes. You will be surprised to know that although Mohammedans have taken Pakistan, dividing India into two parts, still the number of Mohammedans in India is greater than in any other Mohammedan country in the world.

What happened in the partition when India and Pakistan were divided? So many people were burned, whole trains were burned. Trains were coming from Pakistan burning, bringing burned corpses into India. Pakistan has erased Hindus completely, but nobody can say anything. If you say anything you immediately lose your right to freedom of speech, because you are hurting somebody’s religious feelings. It is a strange phenomenon.

And rape has been one of the basic strategies of Mohammedans, because once a Hindu woman is raped by a Mohammedan, or even kept in his house for the whole night without any rape, the Hindu cannot accept the woman again. That is their tradition and their orthodox mind. She has become untouchable; she has to go back.

And how many Jews have been killed by Christians? And what a great conspiracy by America and England in creating Israel amongst an ocean of Mohammedans! Israel had not been in existence for centuries – Mohammedans have been there; its name was Palestine. But this was a strategy, and such a subtle conspiracy, that even Jews could not suspect – in fact, they asked for it. They wanted their own land.

After the second world war it was easier, because Palestine was under American and British troops. So they forced the Jews on the Mohammedans and created a new nation. But the nation is so small, and surrounded on all sides by Mohammedan countries. Since Israel has been created, they have been in continuous trouble. And Mohammedans will never leave them in peace, because it is their country, which has been forcibly taken from them.

It is a subtle strategy to keep the Jews in continuous trouble; they have suffered for almost their whole history of four thousand years. The greatest calamity was Adolf Hitler – he killed six million Jews. And now the second conspiracy of Christian nations is the creation of Israel. This is to keep the Jews always, forever in trouble.

Every religion should be looked into, researched, and the public should be made fully aware of what these people have done to humanity. And all this nonsense that their religious feelings might be hurt should not be paid any attention to. You go on committing crimes against man and, when something is said about it, your “religious feelings” are hurt.

One of the Mohammedan caliphs, Omar, destroyed the greatest library in the world, the library in Alexandria. It contained the ancientmost scriptures from Atlantis, a continent which had sunk into the ocean, and from Lemuria, another small continent that had also gone under water. These were natural calamities – or perhaps man-made, there is no way to find out – but the library contained all their history, all their religions, all their art.

Omar went with his armies to Alexandria, it was the greatest seat of learning in those days. In one of his hands he had the Holy Koran, in the other hand he had a burning torch. He asked the chief librarian, a great scholar, “You have to answer two questions: First, is there some literature in the library which goes against the Holy Koran? If your answer is yes, I am going to burn it. If your answer is no, then too, I am going to burn it. Because if everything in this library is consistent with the Holy Koran, then the Holy Koran is enough. What is the need of having such a big library?”

He did not allow the chief librarian to answer; he answered himself. There was no alternative, either yes or no – in each case he was going to burn the library. And he set the library on fire. The library was so big that it took six months to put the fire out. But he destroyed a great treasure which cannot be recovered in any way.

Devageet, the religions have done immense, incalculable harm to all human values, to human life, to human understanding, to human evolution. And it is time that they should all be mercilessly exposed because that will prepare the ground for the birth of my rebel, for the birth of a great rebellion against these ugly institutions. It will bring the whole of humanity into a loving relationship, without nations, without religions; but with a deep religiousness, with a great respect for life, and great gratitude for existence.

All that is needed is a widespread rebelliousness, particularly in the younger generation, because they are going to live in the future. The past should not be repeated.

You are asking, “Is sannyas a training for rebellion?” Yes, Devageet.

“Are you preparing us to be warriors, fighting for the right to be individuals in a society which labels truth as lies, and calls lies the truth?”

Yes, Devageet.

Osho, The Rebel, Ch 13, Q 3