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Hindu and a Mohammedan really? Can a physician ever find out on the basis of a blood test whether the blood belongs to a Hindu or a Mohammedan? Can anyone determine whether a particular bone has been taken from the body of a Hindu or a Mohammedan? There is no way.
You won't know anything by investigating bodies because the bodies of both -- the Hindu and the Mohammedan -- are made of the same five elements. But if you examine their minds you will surely know who is a Hindu and who is a Mohammedan. For the simple reason that their scriptures are different, their principles are different, their words are different. The difference between the two consists of words. You are a Hindu because you received one kind of knowledge which is labelled as "Hindu". Somebody is a Jaina because he received a different kind of knowledge which is named as Jaina. All the differences between you, all the walls, are the walls of knowledge -- and all your knowledge is borrowed.
Raise a Moslem child in a Hindu household, he will grow to be a Hindu. He will wear the sacred thread like a Brahmin does. He will quote from the Vedas and the Upanishads. Similarly, let a Hindu child be brought up in a Muslim household, he will begin reciting the verses of Koran.
Knowledge binds you. It makes a wall around you. It makes you fight your fellow beings and it brings malice, enmity in your life. Just think for a while, if you were not brought up as a Hindu, a Mohammedan, Jaina, or a Parsi, what would you do? You would grow up as a human being -- without any walls around you.
There are about three hundred religions in the world -- three hundred prisons. Each man is made to be locked up in one or the other prison as soon as he is born. And the priests try their best to have their control lover the child as early as possible. They call it "religious education," but there is nothing more irreligious than this. The child is caught young, before his is seven, because after that it would be difficult each day to exercise control over the child. If the child were to gain even a little bit of understanding, he will begin to raise questions. And the pundits have absolutely no answers
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