Just today I received the message that this Pope the Polack is turning into an absolute dictator. Throughout the past, bishops have been chosen by the local clergy. He has, for the first time, started nominating bishops. There is no more election, but imposition from above; and he is putting his own bishops into all the important positions, removing the bishops chosen by the people, by the clergymen of the locality. Now there is a great uproar, and it is conceivable that in the coming months thousands of bishops are going to march to the Vatican against this dictatorial change in the very policy of the church.

But even before the procession reaches there…it is not going to help. He is putting his own people, who are absolutely conservative, orthodox, in every important city. And he has come up with a very beautiful meaning for the word conservative.

It is an ugly word, but he has come up with the idea that everything needs to be conserved; conservative means one who conserves. He has taken it completely out of context. It has always meant orthodox, reactionary; now he is saying a conservative is one who conserves.

Okay….

A conservative is one who conserves lies.

A conservative is one who conserves all kinds of murderous institutions. The church has been one of the most murderous institutions in the history of man. It has murdered more people than Adolf Hitler. Its whole history is bloody. You want to conserve this?

What does the Catholic church have to conserve? all kinds of nonsense without any logic, without any rationality, without any evidence? What are you going to conserve – the concept of God?

You don’t have a single argument for it. You don’t have anything like enlightenment, which can be an inner experience. Your God is far away above the clouds.

I look again and again, and I see only Jayesh and his great tent. Sometimes I think perhaps God is sitting on Jayesh’s tent – but we have looked; our engineers have been searching all over the tent, and they have never found any God anywhere.

On which cloud is God sitting?

The physicists have explored as far away as possible. Just empty space and stars, but no God.

God has been moving farther away. Wherever man reaches, the theologians, the religious organizations move God away.

In India, first he used to live on Everest in the Himalayas. Shiva, the great god, used to live in the Himalayas. His wife, Parvati – it means one who is born of the mountains, parvat means mountain – was the daughter of the Himalayas. But when man reached and discovered all the peaks of the Himalayas, not even a footprint was found.

The first question Edmund Hillary was asked when he came down from Everest was, “Have you seen God?”

He said, “God? I did not see any sign of him. On the very peak there is not even enough space; only one man can stand there.” If God was living there he would have been standing throughout eternity. You cannot sleep there.