I am not a father figure at all! I am here to destroy all kinds of slavery. And it is true that nobody likes slavery – even if you are forced into paradise, you will hate it. Just the idea of being forced is enough to create hatred.

It is not accidental that Friedrich Nietzsche declared that “God is dead and man is free.” It was bound to happen – if Nietzsche had not declared it, somebody else would have declared it. After all, enough is enough. Twenty centuries of Christian conditioning created Friedrich Nietzsche; he is the outcome of Christianity. Twenty centuries of dependence on God and humanity accumulated so much hatred for God – it was bound to happen, it is very logical. It could have been predicted that man could not tolerate God any more. One has to be free.

Nietzsche simply declared what was in the unconscious of millions of people. He became the voice of this century. Nobody else represents this century as truly as Friedrich Nietzsche. He declared. “God is dead.” And immediately the second declaration is, “Now man is free.” That means God was a slavery, was a burden. God was crushing humanity, God was not allowing man to be himself. He had to die.

There is a beautiful parable in Nietzsche’s great work, Thus Spake Zarathustra:

A madman comes into the marketplace, starts looking here and there and searching with a lamp in the full light of the day. And people start laughing and they ask, “What are you searching for? Are you mad or something? Why are you carrying a lit lamp in the daylight?”

And he said, “I am searching for God. Have you seen him? Has anybody seen him anywhere?”

And people started laughing more. And the crowd started ridiculing the madman, and somebody asked, “Is he a small child who has got lost? Who is this God? What do you mean by God?” And the crowd was laughing hilariously.

And the madman then threw the lamp on the ground. For a moment there was silence, and then he said, “It seems you have not yet heard the news. God is dead! And one more thing: it is we who have murdered him. But it seems the news has not yet reached you – it takes time.”

It is a tremendously significant, meaningful parable. Man has murdered God in the unconscious, and the news has not yet reached the conscious. Maybe the conscious is repressing the news, maybe the conscious is feeling guilty.