Religion of the intellect – the second category, the higher category – is pseudo-religion. Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Mohammedanism – these are all products of the intellect. They are not magico-religious. They have theologies: they have thought about existence, its creation, why it has been created; how one can get out of this wheel of life and birth. They have been thinking about it, pondering over it for thousands of years, and each religion has developed a theology.
The word theology means logic about God. It is a contradiction in terms. God is not a logical proposition: you cannot prove it by logic, you cannot disprove it by logic. Logic is utterly irrelevant to God. But pseudo-religions cannot do more than that, they can only think about. And they have great imagination to portray God. Their scriptures say God created man in his own image. The reality is just the reverse: man creates God in his own image. That’s why there are so many gods – because there are so many men, so many races, so many different faces – eyes, nose…so many different kinds.
You cannot think of a Negro inventing a white god. You may not have thought about why your devil looks like a Negro, why your devil is black. The Negro’s god will be black; and of course the devil has to be pure white. And the white man has proved devilish enough. The Negroes have not only an argument in favor of it, but history also, giving all the evidences of what the white man has done to the colored people of the world. It must have been the greatest evil that has happened in history.
How can a Chinese think of God in any other way than as a Chinese? When Marco Polo went to China, he was the first Western man to reach China. China was under the great empire of Kublai Khan, son of Genghis Khan. Perhaps Kublai was one of the greatest emperors in the world because he ruled over all China, middle Asia, the Far East.
When Marco Polo reached China, he wanted an audience. Kublai Khan was a man of great intelligence. His prime minister said, “A man who looks like a monkey wants to see you. It will be absolutely unprecedented – no emperor has ever given audience to a monkey.” A white man looked like a monkey to them.
Kublai Khan said, “No need to be worried. If he can speak he cannot be absolutely a monkey; there is something human. You bring him in.” And he became interested in Marco Polo. Marco Polo was a very intelligent young man, and he became very intimate with Kublai Khan. When he came back to Europe he reported to the pope, “In China they worship a different God, who looks like a Chinese, and they think of us Europeans as monkeys.”
To us they look a little strange. They have a very little beard – a few hairs, you can count them – flat noses, very outstanding cheekbones. You cannot think of a more ugly face – but they think that is beauty. A man or a woman who does not have those outstanding cheekbones will find it hard to get married; so would a man with a nose that is typical of the Aryan races: Indians, Germans, English, French, Scandinavians, Dutch, Russians…. These are all one race, and to them a pointed nose, a long nose, is thought to be beautiful. But in China that is ugly; and they cannot make their God ugly.