Sannyas is a rebirth, but very much more significant than the first birth, because in the first birth you were very helpless. You had parents, you were dependent. They exploited your helplessness, perhaps with good intentions; I never doubt anybody’s intentions. They took you to the church, they took you to the priest; you were ceremoniously made part of the religion. And they were thinking they were doing good – without ever thinking what good it had done to them, what good it had done to their parents. They have been simply repeating a ritual, generation after generation.
Rebirth is a totally different phenomenon: you again become innocent like a child, but this time you are not dependent, this time you are not helpless. This time nobody can enforce anything on you: you have enough intelligence, enough logic, enough argumentative power – it is not easy to force stupid beliefs on you. That’s your safeguard. The second birth is the beginning of a new life.
I would like the whole earth to begin a new life. It has become stagnant. It is living in such misery and suffering, and still nobody is there to say it – that the people you depend on for your knowledge, your wisdom, are the cause of your misery.
All the religions of the world are against birth control. Naturally they have to be against it, because the more children there are, the more poverty there is going to be. And poverty is a great blessing to the religions: they can convert people, they can open hospitals, orphanages, schools. They can give just little pieces of bread, and comfort people very easily.
If the world is rich and there is nobody who is poor, the whole market from where religions get their slaves disappears. They are not worried about what no birth control can cause. It is causing great misery. This whole year in Ethiopia people have been dying continuously – one thousand people per day – and still Ethiopian priests are not for birth control. Not a single religious leader in the world has said that at least in Ethiopia birth control should be legalized, abortion should be legalized.
They call abortion a sin because it is God who is giving birth to children. It is all pure nonsense! Either God is absolutely an idiot…He does not understand simple economics, that if you give birth to so many children at least send with these children a piece of land, a factory, something to support them.
The earth remains the same. Its productivity is lessening every day because you have been producing for millions of years. It is losing its power, it is becoming barren, and God is not doing anything for the earth, but he goes on sending children. And the priests and the representatives have their own designs – they are not concerned about God.
As far as I know, God himself practices birth control, because he has only one begotten son, Jesus Christ. What happened afterwards? The only possibility is that he started using birth control methods; otherwise, up to now he would have created millions of Jesus Christs.
If you follow God you can understand at least one thing: that in the whole of eternity he has produced only one son – that too, not from his own wife. He had not taken the risk of getting married, because women are women: they may start harassing, nagging, “I want another child; I want a girl. A boy is okay but I want a girl.”