Karl Marx is right that these messiahs and prophets have given opium to the people so they will not see the reality and remain in a hallucinatory world. No, the poor are not blessed! They are suffering. And you have some nerve to say that they are blessed.
We know perfectly well that the rich are making their way to success here.
OSHO
Each generation goes on giving its own conditionings to the new children. And the children cannot doubt, cannot ask… and this whole circus goes on continuing.
Do you know that there are religions that don't have any God?
Buddhism and Jainism don't have any God, and for a very logical reason, almost irrefutable. They say: If everything needs to be created… That is the argument of the theist, that everything has to be created. So this whole existence cannot come out of nowhere, it has to be created — we need a creator. Jainism and Buddhism say: We accept your premise, but then we ask if God is there, who created him?
And if he can be without any creator, then your whole logic falls. Things can be there which are not created. So why go on unnecessarily from A-God to B-God to C-God? And this will lead to a regression. You will never reach to a point where you can say that this is the last God. The question will still be haunting: Who created?
Seeing this absurdity, we accept existence itself as eternal, uncreated — there is no God.
We experience that this existence is not material — it is conscious, fully conscious.
If a Christian wants to understand me, first he has to put his Christianity aside so that he can hear me directly without his Christianity interfering. Otherwise it is the same — Christian or communist, Hindu or fascist, they are full of their own ideas for which they have no foundation, for which they have never looked. They have simply believed. And all the religions teach belief. Religions call themselves faiths.
And my approach is scientific. Science says doubt, go on doubting until you have eliminated all that was not right and you have come to the last thing which you cannot doubt. Its very existence, its very experience, creates a rapport between you and it. That is faith — not something acquired, but something encountered.
So certainly a Christian can understand me, but he will have to unload himself of his Christianity.
As far as Jesus and his teachings are concerned, the first thing to be noted is he was never a Christian. He was born a Jew, he lived as a Jew, he died as a Jew. His whole life's effort was to be accepted by the Jews as their long, long awaited messiah. He had never heard the words `Christian' or `Christ'.
It is a very strange phenomenon that Christians are worshipping a Jew who for his whole life was teaching only one thing — that he should be accepted as a Jewish messiah. It was only three hundred years after his death when the Hebrew statements of Jesus were translated into Greek, that `messiah' became `Christ' and the followers became `Christians'.
Jesus was never aware that he was creating a new religion. Certainly he has a few very beautiful sayings, but not many compared to people like Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, or the seers of the Upanishads. They are very small in number, but they only look beautiful. I will have to analyze a few sayings so that you can understand what I mean.
He says, "Blessed are the poor in spirit because they shall inherit the kingdom of God." This is a kind of opium for the poor, because it promises them, "After death, you will be received with great rejoicings. Your only great spiritual quality is your poverty." And against it he says, "A camel can pass through the eye of a needle, but a rich man cannot pass through the gates of heaven." This is how the poor have been kept poor — hoping for something to happen after death. The rich have never bothered about all this nonsense — and I think they are right. If you can manage to be rich here — which is God's world according to the Christians — then why can you not be rich in the other world which is also God's world? There is no logic in it.
And the people who are beggars here, why should they be beggars here in God's world? And why should they be called blessed? If they are blessed, then the whole earth should become poor, beggars. Perhaps that is happening today. The whole earth is becoming more and more poor. More and more population, hungry people, starving people dying in Ethiopia — almost one thousand people every day. The ordinary poor will be far back in the line; Ethiopians will be received first.
And this is a long history. How many poor people have lived here? So God's paradise will be full of beggars and poor, uneducated, uncultured, uncivilized… And poverty is the root cause of all crime. It is not a blessing, it is a curse. But when Jesus says it to the poor people — and, in fact, he had no approach to the rich — he is giving them a great consolation. These consolations are dangerous.
Karl Marx is right that these messiahs and prophets have given opium to the people so they will not see the reality and remain in a hallucinatory world. No, the poor are not blessed! They are suffering. And you have some nerve to say that they are blessed.
We know perfectly well that the rich are making their way to success here.
They know all the ways of how to succeed. They have lived all the luxuries, all the comforts, all that this world can provide. In fact they are perfectly trained. This life has been a school, and they are the right people to enjoy paradise. What will the poor do there? They will be absolutely unprepared. They will not be able to understand what has happened. If God is so compassionate, then why is he so cruel here?
OSHO