Osho,
The Vatican has just issued a statement in which the pope suggests that cults, sects and “new religions” should be seen as a challenge to church and society.
The statement says that deprogramming of cult members is misguided. The Vatican made the statement after consulting Catholic experts in seventy-five countries. Have you any comment?

Christianity is dying so fast that every effort is being made to somehow keep it alive. No effort is going to succeed, for the simple reason that the whole Christian attitude, the religion and its philosophy, are so out of date that it is impossible to convince intelligent people to have faith in them any more.

Just in England the church attendance has fallen to five percent. Ninety-five percent of people are no more going to the church – and the same is the situation all over the world.

Thinking that perhaps psychology and new trends in psychological schools may be of help, Christianity has been trying for twenty years to imbibe as much psychology as possible, giving it a color of Christianity. The latest effort was deprogramming.

This was a desperate effort – because young people are joining new movements, new religions – and it is for the first time in history that parents are kidnapping their own children, and forcing them into psychiatric homes to be deprogrammed.

It is possible to deprogram a person very easily. And they were very happy because they were succeeding in bringing the sheep which has gone farther away from the fold back into the fold.

But then a new problem arose, and that was: the people who were deprogrammed, for them religion became only a question of programming, it lost the value of being a faith. You can again deprogram the person and he becomes a Hindu; you can again deprogram him and he becomes a communist – so programming and deprogramming became a psychological game. It destroyed the seriousness of the so-called religions: that it was not something of inner realization, it was only a question of conditioning the mind.

The people who were deprogrammed left the new movements, but they never became at ease with Christianity. Now they know what it is all about: it is simply a program. If somebody else kidnaps them and pays the fees to some psychiatrist he can program them into any religion, into any philosophy, into any dogma.

So it is simply a mind game. All talk of spirituality and religion is simply nonsense.

But people like Pope the Polack have no understanding of their own.

This was a simple fact which could have been seen in the very beginning – that if you can change a person’s idea by a certain strategy, the same strategy can be used to change the idea that you have put into his mind.

In communist countries they have been using deprogramming for almost half a century.