I have heard that when Ford first started manufacturing cars, he himself used to go to the showroom and take an interest in the customers, talk to the customers. He would say to them, “You can choose any color provided it is black” – because at that time there were only black cars. But he used to say, “You can choose any color provided it is black.”

You are free, provided your answer is yes. What kind of freedom is this? Puppets cannot have freedom. And if God has simply made you, you are a puppet. It is better to revolt against God and be a being than to submit and be a part of a puppet show, because the moment you accept yourself as a puppet, you have committed suicide.

You see puppets the whole world over, with different colors, different names, different rituals. Hindus say that without God’s will, even a leaf in the tree cannot move – so what about you? Everything happens according to God. In fact, he has determined everything the moment he created; it is predestined. Now, it is so strange that intelligent people also go on believing in such garbage.

Just see the garbage: on the one hand God has created you; on the other hand, when you do something wrong you will be punished. If God has created you, and he has determined your nature and you cannot go against it, you don’t have any freedom. With God there is no possibility to have freedom; then how can you commit a crime, how can you be a sinner and how can you be a saint?

Everything is determined by him, he is responsible; you are not. But people go on believing in both things together: God creating the world, God creating man, woman, everything, and then throwing all responsibility on you. If there is something wrong with you, God is responsible and should be punished. If you are a murderer, then God created a murderer; then he should be responsible for Adolf Hitlers and Joseph Stalins and Mao Zedongs. He created these people.

But no, the religious mind loses intelligence, becomes rusted, forgets completely that these are incompatible things; God and freedom are incompatible. If you are free, then there is no God.

I remind you again of Friedrich Nietzsche’s statement. This man was certainly crazy, but sometimes the so-called sane people are so dumb and so dull, so idiotic, that crazy people come up with great insights – and Nietzsche had that genius. Once in a while he came up with such a great insight that you cannot believe why people had not seen it before; and Nietzsche lived just a hundred years ago.

He said, “God is dead, therefore, I declare, man from now onwards is free.” This whole sentence brings freedom and God together for the first time in the whole history of mankind. It was waiting for this crazy man, Friedrich Nietzsche, to put these together: that God is dead, therefore you are free; otherwise, you are not free.