From Ignorance to Innocence - Osho - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 8. GOD IS NOT A SOLUTION BUT A PROBLEM
Without an independent being of your own, how can you be religious?
God is the greatest anti-religious idea.
If you look into it from every aspect, then those who believe in God are not religious, cannot be
religious.
So when I say there is no God, I am trying to save religion.
There is no danger from the devil, the real danger comes from God. The devil is only His shadow.
If God disappears the shadow will disappear automatically.
The real problem is God.
And you can see what I am saying if you look at history. Every step in evolution is stopped by the
churches out of fear that it proves that creation is incomplete. Man has reached the moon, but in
India I have come across Hindu shankaracharyas, Jaina acharyas – they are equivalent to the pope
– who don’t believe it, because their scriptures say that the moon is a goddess. The sun is a god
– so the moon is not a planet. You will be surprised to know that one Jaina monk has accumulated
millions of rupees in donations because he is creating a lab to prove that man has not reached the
moon, he has landed on some other planet!
Now, these idiots... and people believe in them because the scriptures are in their favor. They
collect all the quotations from all the scriptures spoken by people who are omniscient, omnipotent,
omnipresent: avataras, tirthankaras, God’s special messengers. And if they say this, then what can
poor scientists do?
They are deceiving you, cheating you, cheating themselves. A fact that nobody can deny, a fact that
all the scientists of the whole world, including India, have accepted, is not acceptable to the religious
mind because it will destroy their faith in the scriptures. They are more worried about their faith than
about reality.
When I say God is the greatest enemy of religion, it is going to shock the so-called religious people,
because they think praying to God, worshipping God, surrendering to God is what religion is.
They have never thought about responsibility, freedom, growth, consciousness, being; they have
never bothered – and yet these are the real religious questions.
Your prayers are silly. You are simply praising God in the same way you have been praising kings
and queens; in the same tone, in the same words. You are praising God and thinking that just as
your queens and kings become influenced by your prayer and you can persuade them to do favors
for you, so you will be able to persuade God.
The Bible’s statement that God created man in His own image is absolutely wrong. Just the contrary
is true: man created God in his own image; it is man’s creation – God! Hence the Hindu God is
different, the Mohammedan God is different, the Jewish God is different, because different people
From Ignorance to Innocence 106 Osho