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small boy raised his hand to ask a question. The teacher said, "What is your question?"
He said, "My question is: THE BIBLE says, `God drove out Adam and Eve.' What model of car did he use?"
It must have been a Ford -- the first model, called the Model-T Ford. And I think that poor God is still driving the Model-T Ford without any mechanics, because neither is his son Jesus Christ a mechanic, nor is the Holy Ghost, nor is He Himself.
Christianity thinks that God punished man. My understanding and insight says: God may have thought He was punishing them, but the reality is that God is still imprisoned in a walled garden. And it was a blessing in disguise that he made man free. His intention was not good, but the result was the whole evolution of man. And if evolution is not going as fast as it should go, again the priests of God, of all religions, are preventing it.
When Galileo found that it is not the sun that goes around the earth, that it is an appearance and not a reality.... The reality is just the opposite: the earth goes around the sun. When he wrote a treatise explaining his reasons, evidence, proofs, arguments, he was very old -- seventy or seventy-five -- and sick, bedridden, almost dying. But Christian love is such that the people of the pope dragged him from his bed to the court of the pope.
The pope said, "You have committed the gravest crime, because THE BIBLE says, and everybody knows, that the sun goes around the earth. Either you have to change your opinion, or death will be the penalty."
Galileo, even in his old age, sick and dying, must have been an immensely beautiful man, a man with a sense of humor. He said, "Your Honor, there is no problem. I can write what you are saying. There is just one thing I want to make clear to you -- that my writing is going to be read neither by the sun nor by the earth. They will continue in their old way, as they have always done. The earth will continue to go around the sun. You can burn my book or I can change the paragraph."
The pope said, "You change the paragraph."
He changed the paragraph and wrote, "According to THE BIBLE and according to the pope
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