From Ignorance to Innocence - Osho - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 9. I TEACH A RELIGIONLESS RELIGION
So I congratulate you that you are shocked; it is a good beginning. The stupid person will be angry,
not shocked. He will immediately become an enemy; he will not be shocked. To be shocked means
that something in you is still alive, that the priests, the politicians, the pedagogues have not been
completely successful with you. Perhaps a window has remained open; that’s why you are shocked.
And do you see the miracle of the shock? – immediately a question of tremendous importance
arises in you.
Your question is not out of anger, it is not out of irritation. It is a valid, intelligent, tremendously
significant question: How can there be religion without God? That’s what you have been told for
centuries, that God is the center and religion is its circumference.
This is an absolute lie.
Religion has nothing to do with God at all.
Yes, it has much to do with you, your consciousness, your being.
You ask, how can there be a religion without God? One day, if you go on enquiring, you will ask me
how can there be a religion WITH God?
And I would like you to contemplate how there can be a religion with God. God is nothing but our
idea of the ultimate dictator, the ultimate Adolf Hitler.
He creates the world, just whimsically; there is no reason to create it. No religion has been able to
answer why He created the world in the first place – and this world: ugly, nauseous, disgusting; this
humanity, which religions go on proclaiming to be the highest peak of God’s creation.
God created man in His own image – what can be higher than that? And what has man been doing?
In three thousand years, five thousand wars! The whole of history is a history of murder, rape, crime
– and murder, rape and crime in the name of God.
Millions of people have been killed, burned alive in the name of God.
And God created man in His own image!
So you can think something about God too, just a little inference that if this is the image, then what
will be the real? If Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin and Benito Mussolini and Mao Tse-tung are only
carbon copies, then what will be the original? It is going to be terrible!
If God created this world, man and everything, it should show signs of divinity, signatures of God,
but they are completely missing. If He cannot read and write, He can at least make a thumbprint.
There seems to be no signature anywhere. It seems more probable that it was created by the devil
rather than by God, because ninety-nine percent of proofs are for the devil, not for God.
With God you cannot create religion, for the simple reason that God has already created the Bible
for the Christians, the Torah for the Jews, the Vedas for the Hindus.... He has created them already;
He has given you ready-made religions. He has not allowed you to seek and search and find.
From Ignorance to Innocence 111 Osho