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with a sword in one hand, a naked sword, and in another hand, the holy KORAN. You could choose. Now, it is very difficult for human beings to choose a life of something which they don't agree with, but they had to choose it because it was not a question of choosing between two doctrines, two philosophies: it was a choice between life and death. Life is good -- and who cares about the KORAN?
Mohammedans have converted millions of people just by forcing them with the sword; their only argument was the sword. Now the world has changed; its strategies have changed. If you go to somebody with a sword you will be imprisoned.
Christian missionaries are still doing the same thing, with a little change: in one hand is THE HOLY BIBLE, in the other hand is bread and butter. The world is so poor... and these people want the world to remain poor because they have been able to convert only the poor. This point has to be remembered: Christianity has not been able to convert a single cultured, educated, high-class person around the world. It has been able only to convert the beggars, the orphans, the starving, the dying, the sick.
Those people are not choosing Christianity, they are choosing bread and butter. They are hungry. They are choosing medicine and hospitals. They are choosing schools for their children. They have nothing to do with Christianity, but if all these things can come only through Christianity they are -- unwillingly -- ready to accept it.
But willingly or unwillingly, they go on increasing the number of Catholics in the world. That makes the pope more and more powerful: wherever he has the majority of Catholics, that nation is under his thumb. Its politicians have to listen to him.
You cannot compare my trip around the world to a political trip of the pope. In fact I am traveling around the world against the political structures.
For example, in your own land, in Germany: I have never been there, and they are so afraid -- of a man who has never been there, who has never even applied for any visa for any tour -- that they have made a law that I cannot enter Germany. Strange world! I have not committed any crime on their
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