I have heard: two small boys were playing, a Christian and a Jew. The Jewish boy asked – because a Christian minister had passed and the Christian boy had saluted and asked the blessings of the father…. The Jewish boy said, “It is very strange, your religion; your father has no wife, has no children. How does he become a father?”

How do women, nuns, become mother superiors? They are not married; they don’t have children. The reason is psychological: people need father figures.

Even Jesus behaves in a retarded way when he calls God the father. Many things are implied in it. Calling God the father means he cannot remain independent, on his own. He needs a great omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient father.

Jesus died on the cross in immense frustration, because all his hopes were crushed. He shouted at the sky, “Father, have you forsaken me?” But nobody bothers to think that the father has never promised anything. It was all your imagination. You create a father, far above in the sky, then you start praying to the father. And naturally your prayers are mostly not fulfilled. You know – because you are a sinner – your prayer is not authentic. Deep down you doubt, you are skeptical, and prayer is fulfilled only when there is total surrender. And that is impossible.

Doubt is something essential, something you are born with. You can repress it, but you cannot eliminate it. It is repressed, but it is within you and will not allow your surrender and belief to be total. And naturally all the religions are telling you that you are born in sin, and you are committing sin in everything – by getting married, by having children, by eating this, by drinking that.

If you follow exactly what religions want you to do, suicide is the only virtue. You cannot live, you cannot laugh, you cannot love. Naturally, you know your prayers are not heard, not answered, because you are not worthy.

But you never look at the problem: is there anyone to listen to your prayers, or is it only your projection? Out of helplessness and fear, you create the father. And then out of misery and suffering, you pray.

Once in a while a prayer is fulfilled. That is simply coincidence. That does not prove the reality of God or the reality of prayer.

It happened, once a man used to meet me when I used to go for a morning walk. He was the only other man up that early in the morning. We became sort of friends. He told me, “I am a great believer in the monkey god Hanuman.”

Indians have strange gods. It is good that Darwin never came to India; otherwise he would have used this monkey god as one of the proofs that man has come from the monkeys. Man is still worshipping his forefathers – and it looks logical.

But Indians worship trees; Indians worship rivers. Indians worship phallic symbols – absolutely pornographic. India is really a museum of all the bizarre and berserk. It is one of the oldest countries; it has collected really antique stupidities, and continues.

The man said to me, “I am a worshipper of Hanuman, the monkey god. Hanuman is a true god.”