Marx’s vision never reached beyond that, but my understanding and my vision is far more perfect. To me, communism is only the first stage – not the last. And as communism succeeds, people will drop the inferiority complex – which is needed by the priests, which is needed by the people who are driving humanity into different kinds of slavery. And when there is no God, there is no guilt – without guilt no organized religion can live. It is guilt that takes people to the churches, because they become afraid: they have committed sins, now they will suffer hellfire for eternity. So something has to be done to remove the guilt.

All religions provide fictions. In India just now there has been Kumbh Mela; it is going on in Allahabad. Millions of people – perhaps this is the biggest fair in the world – just go to the Ganges.…To take a dip in the Ganges means all your sins are taken by the Ganges and you come out absolutely clean. That does not mean that you will stop committing sins; that simply means you have found a very cheap method to get rid of your sins and guilt, so you can commit as many sins as you want! There is no problem, just a small journey to Allahabad, take a dip in the Ganges, and all your rapes and murders, and anything that you have committed, the Ganges takes away. This is the Hindu strategy to keep you feeling guilty.

And the priests are there, you cannot take the dip alone. The priest has to take you into the Ganges in a boat. And he will be reciting mantras, and then you take the dip, and you have to pay the priest. The priest is the agent of the God who does not exist.

In the Catholic religion, you have to go to the priest to confess your sins, and for just ten dollars and five “Hail Marys” your sins are erased. God has forgiven you.

I have always wondered that not a single Catholic theologian – and they have great theologians, very intellectual – has raised the question that when a man rapes a woman and God forgives him just because he has given ten dollars to the priest and done five “Hail Marys,” is God absolutely unaware of the woman who has been raped? The criminal is forgiven – and the victim? Not a single theologian of any religion has ever thought, “What about the victim who has suffered?”

A man kills someone and he goes to the priest and he is forgiven. He goes to the Ganges, gives some money to the priest, takes a dip, and he is forgiven. What about the murdered?

God does not seem to be just. He is in favor of the criminals and sinners. For them he is a father who forgives – but what about the victims? There is not a single word in any scripture of the organized religions which takes note of the victims. God seems to be favorable to the sinners, to the criminals, but not favorable to the victims. He has no sympathy for the victims.

Just today I received a letter from a sannyasin who has been abused by her father in her childhood, sexually abused. And now she suffers continuously the nightmare that her father exploited her innocence. She did not know anything about sex, and her own father….