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had nothing to do with the devil, that there was nothing to confess. But nobody listened to them; they went on torturing them.
You can make anybody confess anything if you go on torturing him. A point comes when he feels it is better to confess rather than to unnecessarily suffer the same torture every day. And it would have continued for his whole life. Once a woman confessed that she was a witch and was having a sexual relationship with the devil, her torture was stopped and then she was presented before a court -- a special court made by the pope -- and before the court she was to now confess. And once she confessed before the court, the court was able to punish her -- because it is the greatest crime in the eyes of Christianity.
In fact, even if the woman was having a sexual relationship with the devil, it is none of the business of anybody else -- and it is not a crime, because she is not harming anybody. And the devil has never complained to any police station, "That woman is dangerous." On what authority was Christianity burning these women?
The only punishment was to be burned alive so that no other woman dared to be a witch again. They destroyed thousands of women and completely removed a very significant part of humanity. And the wisdom that those women contained -- their books, their methods, their techniques of transforming man, transforming man's energy....
So the first thing to be understood is: don't think that witch is a bad word. It is more respectable than `pope' -- because I don't think a pope is a man who can be called wise; they are just parrots and nothing else. It is possible that it may be connected with your past life, and the wound has been so deep that still some remembrance in your unconscious goes on reminding you. And that creates the hate for men, because what was done to you was done by men.
So it is a simple association, but that association has to be dropped. It was not done by men, it was done by Christians. And the Christians have done so many crimes, and they go on doing them. It is unbelievable.
Just now in the United States, there is a case in the court against the Catholic church,
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