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-- and it is not that the parents deceive the child intentionally. They are unconscious. They have also been deceived by their parents.
Every generation has been corrupting every new generation. The parents don't know whether God exists or not, but they pretend before the child as if God exists; they take him to the church, or to the synagogue, or to the temple. Neither they know nor their rabbis and their bishops and their priests know.
It is a very mad world. Blind people are leading other blind people. And nobody raises the question: where are we going and why?
From the very beginning I refused to believe in anything unless I was convinced. Everybody was irritated with me -- and I was not doing any harm to anybody. They wanted me to go to the temple. They wanted me to touch the feet of somebody they thought was a saint.
I said, "I don't have any objection. I can touch his feet. I can even touch his head, but at least I must know why I am doing it. What qualities has this man got?"
And the replies I got were so ridiculous... "Because this man has renounced the world."
So I said, "That simply proves this man is a coward. He's an escapist. And if he has renounced the world then what is he doing here? This too is the world!
"He may have left his house but now he's staying in somebody else's house. He has simply renounced his responsibilities. He has left his wife and his children. The children will become beggars, the wife will become a prostitute, and who is responsible for it? And this man has become a parasite, because he is not doing anything. His whole job is to let people touch his feet."
My father stopped taking me. But I would follow him and he would say, "Listen, you are not to come with me."
I said, "I am not coming with you. And this road does not belong to you. I don't know where you are going and I don't even want to know. Neither do you need to be worried about me. It is just coincidence that you happen to be ahead of me and I happen to be behind you."
He would stop. I would stop. He said, "This is not good, creating unnecessary fuss in the marketplace."
I said, "you are creating,
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