A Christian is one who talks about truth and knows nothing about it. A Christ is one who knows about it. It is his experience. The Christian has no experience of his own, he is simply repeating the words of Christ. And repeating others’ words is a stupid activity. This repetition is called believing. Remember, religion has nothing to do with believing. The whole foundation of religion is seeing, not believing. Remember, only blind people believe in light. Those who have eyes, they don’t believe in light, they know! The moment you know something, the necessity for belief disappears.

But the world is full of believers. That means the world is full of blind people. And how have you come to a certain belief? Just a coincidence – that you were born into a certain family and they started imposing their beliefs upon you. You are a Hindu. You have not chosen to be a Hindu, you have been forced to be a Hindu by your parents, by your society. Or you are a Jew, or you are a Mohammedan…but you have not chosen it, and religion is not so cheap that anybody else can impose it upon you. It has to be one’s individual choice.

Religion has to be chosen out of freedom. It is not a conditioning. Belief is a conditioning. Belief means you have been made afraid that if you don’t believe you will be punished; hence, the hell. Hell is for those who don’t believe. And those who believe? – for them are all the joys of paradise.

It is the same psychology that pervades the schools, the colleges, the universities, the law courts. They all think that if you want people to be a certain way, the only possibility is to create fear and to create greed. And how can you be religious if you are full of fear and greed, fear of hell and greed for paradise? That is the trick that has been played upon you. You have been cheated, you have been exploited, and you have been only given words – words which mean nothing to you.

When Buddha says something it has meaning. When Buddhists repeat it they are repeating like parrots. The parrot can repeat a mantra, there is no difficulty in it, you can teach the parrot. And the same methods have to be applied as are applied to you: if he learns the mantra he gets beautiful food, if he does not learn the mantra then he is punished, he has to starve, he is denied food. He is forced to learn. This is what psychologists call conditioning.

And there are people like B.F. Skinner who say that man can be conditioned for any behavior, just give him enough punishment and enough reward and you can manage, you can change anybody’s behavior.

Why are you being good? Not that you really feel like being good – there is a great fear that if you are not good then you will have to suffer for it later on. The whole of humanity is living in fear and greed – and you call these religions?

Religions are not possible, only a religiousness is possible.

You are too much burdened with words. You say, “We have come to know that you believe that all other religions are humbug.” You have not even listened to me, you have not even been in communion with me. You have “come to know”…. You have heard it from others who may have heard it from somebody else. That you believe. If you had been here for a few days you would have come to know that I don’t believe in anything.