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situation would have been just the opposite, because there they go on repeating, "There is no God."
One of my friends visited Soviet Russia. He was a teacher, and he was very interested in the Soviet system of education, so he visited schools, colleges, universities -- many schools. And he told me that even small children laugh at the idea of God.
On his first visit he went to a small school and asked the small children, "Do you believe in God?" They all laughed. They said, "Do you?" And he said, "Yes, I believe in God." And they said, "In the past, primitive people used to believe in God, ignorant people used to believe in God. Now nobody believes in God." These children are conditioned to believe that there is no God.
Just because of the word "no", don't think that it is a negation -- it is an affirmation. Affirmation can be of belief, affirmation can be of disbelief.
Real negation means helping people to get rid of all kinds of beliefs and disbeliefs, helping them to get rid of all the conditionings that the society enforces upon you.
Adolf Hitler in his autobiography writes: "There is only a very small difference between truth and untruth. Truth is untruth repeated many times, that's all."
And he is right in many ways. Repeat any untruth, just go on repeating it, and sooner or later people will start believing it. People have believed in all kinds of things for the simple reason that the people who were in authority were believers, they believed in these things. If they believed in God, then the masses believed in God. People look up to the authorities: the priests, the politicians, the rich people, the scholars, the professors. If they are all believers, then there must be a God. If they believe that there is no God, then the masses start following them. The masses are simply imitators. And the society -- every society -- creates a certain atmosphere of conditioning. No society exists in the world yet which does not live through this process of conditioning.
And the whole process of conditioning is harmful, poisonous, because it destroys the freedom of the individual. It destroys his capacity to inquire into
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