"I call this their greatest harm because without authentic religion man can only vegetate, cannot really live. He remains a superficial being; he cannot attain to any profundity, authenticity. He knows nothing about his own depths. He knows about himself through others, what they say. Just the way you know your face through the mirror, so you are acquainted with yourself through other people's opinions; you don't know yourself directly. And the opinions that you depend on are of those people who are in a similar situation: they don't know themselves.

"These religions have created a society of blind people, and they go on telling them 'You don't need eyes.' Jesus had eyes – what is the need for Christians to have eyes? All that you have to do is to believe in Jesus; he will lead the way to paradise, you simply have to follow. You are not allowed to think, because thinking may take you astray. It is bound to take you on different paths than they want you to go, because thinking means sharpening your doubt, your intellect. And that is very dangerous for the so-called religions. Those religions want you dull, dead, somehow dragging; they want you without intelligence. But they are clever in using good names: they call it faith. It is nothing but the suicide of your intelligence.

"A true religion will not require faith from you. A true religion will require experience. It will not ask you to drop your doubt, it will help you to sharpen your doubt so that you can inquire to the very end.

"The true religion will help you to find your truth.

"And remember, my truth can never be your truth because there is no way of transferring truth from one person to another. Mohammed's truth is Mohammed's truth; it cannot be yours just by becoming a Mohammedan. To you it will remain only a belief, and who knows whether Mohammed knows or not? Who knows, Jesus may simply be a fanatic, neurotic. That's what modern psychiatrists, psychologists and psychoanalysts agree upon: that Jesus was a mental case.

"To declare oneself to be the only begotten son of God, to declare, 'I am the messiah who has come to redeem the whole world from suffering and sin' – do you think it is normal? And how many people has he redeemed? I don't think that he was able to redeem even a single person from suffering and sin."