It is all the religions who are the real criminals because they have destroyed all the possibilities of rejoicing. They have destroyed the possibility of enjoying the small things of life; they have condemned everything that nature provides you to make you happy, to make you feel excited, feel pleasant. They have taken everything away; and if they have not been able to take away a few things because they are so ingrained in your biology – like sex – they have at least been able to poison them.
Friedrich Nietzsche, according to me, is one of the greatest seers of the Western world; his eyes really go penetrating to the very root of a problem. But because others could not see it – their eyes were not so penetrating, nor was their intelligence so sharp – the man lived alone, abandoned, isolated, unloved, unrespected.
He says in one of his statements that man has been taught by religions to condemn sex, to renounce sex. Religion has not been able to manage it; and man has tried hard, but has failed because it is so deeply rooted in his biology – it constitutes his whole body. He is born out of sex – how can he get rid of it except by committing suicide? So man has tried, and religions have helped him to get rid of it – thousands of disciplines and strategies have been used. The total result is that sex is there, but poisoned.
That word poisoned is a tremendous insight. Religions have not been able to take away sex, but they have certainly been successful in poisoning it.
The same is the situation about other things: religions are condemning your living in comfort. Now, a man who is living in comfort and luxury cannot become a terrorist. Religions have condemned riches, praised poverty; now, a man who is rich cannot be a terrorist. Only the “blessed ones” who are poor can be terrorists – because they have nothing to lose, and they are boiling up against the whole of society because others have things they don’t have. Religions have been trying to console them.
But then came communism – a materialist religion – which provoked people and said to them, “Your old religions are all opium to the people, and it is not because of your evil actions in this life or in past lives that you are suffering poverty. It is because of the evil exploitation of the bourgeois, the super-rich, that you are suffering.”
The last sentence in Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto is: Proletariats of the whole world unite; you have nothing to lose and you have the whole world to gain. “You are already poor, hungry, naked – so what can you lose? Your death will not make you more miserable than your life is making you. So why not take a chance and destroy those people who have taken everything away from you. Take those things back, distribute them.”
What the religions have somehow been consoling people with, communism suddenly made them aware of: although it was wrong and it was cunning and it was a lie, it kept people in a state of being half asleep.
Now that means this world is never going to be peaceful unless we withdraw all the rotten ideas that have been implanted in man. The first are the religions. Their values should be removed so that man can smile again, can laugh again, can rejoice again, can be natural again.