In God's name

Beloved master,

Is sannyas a training for rebellion? Are you preparing us to be warriors in the fight for the right to be individuals in a society which labels truth as lies, and calls lies the truth? I have just read David Yallop's book, "in God's name", in which he clearly lays out the role of the roman catholic church in murder, terrorism, embezzlement, drug running, and major and continuing swindling of incredible sums of money; manipulation of politics in America, Italy, South America, Poland... The list is as impressive as it is far from the message of the carpenter from Nazareth. Will you please comment?
 
Devageet,

What David Yallop's book has done is a tremendous contribution to understand the murderous instinct of the Catholic church. The same is needed to be done about every religion -- because they all are doing the same thing, more or less. Perhaps the Catholic church is the best example because it is the most organized religion in the world, and the greatest in numbers. Seven hundred million people are catholics!
 
And that religion has committed every crime that you can imagine. It has burned thousands of women alive, by fictitiously labeling them as witches. There is no devil anywhere, and there are no witches anywhere. But these women were chosen to be destroyed because they were competitors to the catholic religion. They were carrying the older and more ancient tradition of the days when the world was pagan. They were nature worshipers.
 
And for catholicism that is the worst crime -- because that means there is no need of a god, nature is enough. There is no need of a jesus christ as a savior, because nobody is drowning. And there is no need for the catholic priests and their confessionals -- because nature knows nothing as sin.
 
These women were burned alive because they were pagans. But just to burn them because they were pagans was not enough of an excuse. They had to be condemned in such a way that their being burned alive could be supported rationally. First, they were tortured for days together: special mechanisms were invented to torture them.
 
When, six years before, I had a bad back and i was in tremendous pain, the doctors brought a small mechanism; they call it traction. It pulls you -- your legs in one direction, your hands in another direction -- to fix your backbone. I asked the doctors, "do you know who has invented this machine?" they were not aware.
 
It was invented by the catholic church to torture the so-called witches. Sometimes their legs would come off the body; sometimes their hands would come off the body. It was just a coincidence that one woman who was suffering from a bad back for years, and nothing had been of any help... When she was tortured on this mechanism, she was amazed -- her back pain disappeared. So the traction machine is a contribution of the catholic church, and later on it moved to the hospitals.
 
And after a week or two weeks of continuous torture -- no food, beating, not allowing them to sleep -- the women, in a kind of helplessness, finally confessed. Because unless they would confess, the torture would continue. So what was the point? You could not escape.
 
The church was very powerful: it was not only the religion, it was also the government. It had all the powers of religion and all the powers of the government, of the state. So whatever they asked, the women confessed. The priests dictated the confession. They told them that they had to confess that they were having a sexual relationship with the devil -- with full details.
 
And they had to confess it in the court. The full details were given to them -- that the devil has a forked penis, not an ordinary penis. Forked, so that he could enter the woman from both her entries simultaneously. And those poor women had to confess in the court, and then the court ordered them to be burned alive because they had committed the gravest sin.
 
Osho
The Rebel
Ch #13: shadows of the dead
Chuang Tzu auditorium