The first question:

Osho,
Please talk about the Antichrist and tell us what it could be. I have always heard it being commented upon with great fear and with no explanation. People don’t know what it is and yet they fear it.

The priest has lived as a parasite; he has been sucking people’s blood – and his whole trade secret is creating fear. All the religions have been fear-oriented. When I say “all the religions” I don’t include Gautam the Buddha, Jesus Christ, Zarathustra, Mahavira or Lao Tzu. These individuals don’t belong to any religion at all. Religions are a collective phenomenon, and the moment a collectivity, a crowd gathers around a dogma, exploitation starts immediately.

The buddhas, the awakened ones, have not created any religions. It is absolutely a wrong notion prevalent all over the world that Gautam Buddha founded Buddhism or Jesus Christ founded Christianity. It is absolutely wrong; nothing can be more wrong than that. Christianity is created by people of a totally different caliber – the unawakened ones, but cunning, clever – the priests.

The priests are the most cunning people in the world; even the politicians are not so cunning. The priests even exploit the politicians. The priest is the real Antichrist, anti-Buddha, anti-Mahavira – anti-truth, in a sense. The priest lives on lies, he fabricates lies. He is clever enough to exploit human misery, human fear, human greed, human possessiveness, human weakness as such.

For example, every man is born with fear; it is natural. In the mother’s womb the child is absolutely fearless; there is nothing to fear. He is absolutely taken care of by existence itself; there is no worry, no anxiety, no fear. But the moment he comes out of the womb, even passing through the passage from the womb to the world, fear starts arising; he feels suffocated. The canal that he has to pass through is narrow. He feels cramped, he feels as if he is being murdered, killed.

To the child himself, birth is just like death – or even worse, because when you die you simply die. There is nothing much to it; you stop breathing. But when the child is born he starts breathing, he becomes alive, and he finds himself in a very strange situation – upside-down, head coming first. He is losing his beautiful home. The womb has been so warm, so comfortable, that psychologists say man has been searching again and again the same comfort, the same luxury, the same warmth.