Religion Is Dead – By Osho

THOSE WHO ARE WITH ME ARE COURAGEOUS PEOPLE. Once I am gone, your children and your children’s children may pay their respect to me, but they will not be courageous.

RELIGION EXISTS ONLY WHEN THERE IS AN ALIVE MASTER TO LIVE IT FOR YOU.
When the master is gone, then religion becomes dead. Cowardly people gather together around a dead religion. Then there is no fear. They worship the scripture, they worship the word, they worship the statue — all dead things.

But whenever a Jesus is there, or a Buddha is there, or a Mohammed is there, they are very much afraid. They find thousand and one ways to escape; they find thousand and one ways to rationalize their escape.
THEY CONDEMN THE REAL MASTER — WHY? THE REAL MASTER WILL NOT SUPPORT YOUR COWARDICE. He will not give you any more greed — you already have too much — and he will not make you afraid. His whole effort will be to take fear and greed away from you, so that you can become capable of living your life in totality.

Christianity and religions like that had to happen. They have to be forgiven; don’t be angry about them. But now they have to go, too — now the world is no more in need of them. They are tumbling, they are scattering, they are dying. In fact, they are dead. But people are so blind that for them to know that their church or their temple is dead takes such a long time. They are so unconscious, they cannot understand it immediately.

CHRISTIANITY IS DEAD, HINDUISM DEAD, ISLAM IS DEAD. In Islam, only a small thing lives, still has a flame — that is Sufism. In Christianity, only a few mystics are still alive. Otherwise, the church and the pope and the Vatican are just cemeteries, graveyards.

In Hinduism, few mystics are still alive — a Krishnamurti, somewhere a Raman — but far and few in between. Otherwise, the shankaracharyas are dead people. But nobody goes to a living master. In Buddhism only Zen is alive. In Judaism only Hassidism is alive.

The organized religion is not the real religion.
THE UNORGANIZED, THE REBELLIOUS, THE UNORTHODOX, THE HERETIC RELIGION IS THE REAL RELIGION — HAS ALWAYS BEEN SO. Religion comes always as a rebellion — its very spirit is that of rebelliousness.

THE DAYS FOR CHRISTIANITY, HINDUISM, ISLAM, ARE GONE.
In the future, a totally different kind of religion, a different kind of climate, will surround the earth. RELIGIONS WILL DISAPPEAR; THERE WILL ONLY BE A KIND OF RELIGIOUSNESS. People will find their own religion individually; people will find their own prayer, their own way of praying. There is no need to follow anybody’s prescribed idea — that is not the path, that is not the way of the courageous. That is the way of the coward. And God is available — you just have to become courageous to look into his eyes.

(OSHO)
From ‘Zen: The Path of Paradox’