In the first place God has nothing to do with the Scouts. The Scouts have nothing to do with God. This is an unnecessary hypothesis imposed on children. But behind this whole facade are your politicians, your religious leaders. In a very roundabout way they are forcing on small children the idea of God.

They are afraid, they are very much frightened of inquiry. Why one should be afraid of inquiry? – the answer is clear. He knows perfectly well that it is only a belief. If you inquire deeply, you are not going to find God. If God is a reality, then all the religions should insist on inquiry.

I insist: inquire, meditate, go deeper into yourself. You will find a tremendous reality, but not God. You will find consciousness in its ultimate flowering, eternal. But you will not find an old man with a long beard – and the beard must be by this time really long, miles long; for centuries he has been sitting there. You will not find God.

All religions are frightened of inquiry – that’s why the separation happened. And all the religions have been against science, because sooner or later science is going to prove – it has proved already-that its method of doubt brings you closer to reality. It opens secrets of life; it makes you really intelligent, alert, knowing what the truth is.

But science up to now has remained concerned only with the objective world that surrounds you.

I condemn the religions because they have kept humanity in darkness.

And I condemn the scientists because they are doing such a stupid thing: they are aware of everything, and inquiring about everything in the world except themselves.

The scientist in his lab is the only person who is left out of inquiry. Everything else he inquires about and inquires deeply, without any prejudice. But he forgets who the inquirer is. And is there any inquiry possible without an inquirer? Is there any possibility of observing objective reality without an observer? And that’s what science has been doing for three hundred years.

The religions are criminal, but science has also to take the burden of that crime – not that big, because science is only three hundred years old. But science cannot say anything about the subjective world for or against, because it has not inquired.

Religions have to disappear completely – they are a kind of cancer on the human soul – and science has to extend its inquiry, make it complete. It is only half. You are just looking at the object and forgetting the person who is looking at it.

Science has to grow a new dimension that goes inwards. Doubt will be the method for both, so there is no question of bridging. Doubt is the center. From that center you can move into objective reality – that’s what science has been doing up to now. You can move from the same doubt into your interiority, which science has not done up to now. It is guilty of that. And because science was not doing it, it left the subjective world in the hands of religions.