Shri Mahendranath on Religion
To make this document of value to a wider section of readers, it might be necessary to state and repeat things that are taken for granted in a brief survey of Adi-Nath tradition. One of these is the popular delusion, but more often a deliberate lie, that all religions are one and the same and all teach the same goal. If such were really so, it would be pointless for different religions to exist as separate religions if they all taught the same thing. In practice, nowhere in the world would we find people willing to be Christian one week, Muslims the next, Buddhists the next, and so on. All too often the sop of imagined unity and sameness is preached by the holy pickpockets and pious cut-purses. Religions may fall into many classifications, but unity is not one of them.
Most religions are established forms of brainwashing, and none are without their organizational systems to rob the rich and take from the poor. They tell you what you must believe and make you pay to maintain it. There has never been a poor religion in history, or any which folded up for lack of funds. Because a religion reaches the status of being a world religion, it does not imply that it has done so because its teachings are true, but rather that there are more idiots in the world than was at first anticipated. Some religions have spread on the cut-throat method: “join us or else…”
Islam uses this pious technique, and history records how it spread and conquered the other religions wherever it invaded. Only one place in the world is a unique exception. India never became a Muslim nation, although it lived for years under Muslim oppression. Some religions, such as the Black Dharmas—Hebrew, Christian, and Islam—have lived and flourished in the atmosphere of blood and violence. They claim their teaching will take a man to heaven, so killing people might have been only to help them on their way. These Black Dharmas all assign an inferior place to women. They rely on the sacred word of scriptures from which none may deviate. Where they rule have always been the most miserable and impoverished places of the world.
Within the religions themselves are differences which cannot be reconciled with other religions, and even in the same religion, there are many conflicting different sects. None of them claim their God is the same as the God of others, and they differ much in their concepts of heaven and in numerous other aspects. All assert that unless you belong or worship or believe in just their own particular pattern, then salvation is impossible. For any individual to change from one of these religions to another has the same relative value as a jackal trying to change into a fox.
—Shri Gurudev Mahendranath, The Yoga Vidya of Immortality
