"And if he was right, as the whole of Christianity considers him, then why did the Jews crucify him? Could not a single rabbi, learned in the ancient religion of the Jews, stand up and say that this man was innocent? He may have been imagining, hallucinating, but that is not a crime; he may have been dreaming that he was the son of God, but that too is not a crime to be punished by crucifixion.

"It is absolutely clear that the Jews were angry at Jesus for the simple reason that he was a 'self-styled' son of God.

"God is a fiction, invented by the pathological mind of man, and fictions don't breed sons and daughters. And what happened to God after Jesus? Has he gone on birth control?

"What is the criterion? Because Jesus was drinking wine, eating meat and fish, of course no Indian religion will accept him even as religious.

"But the same is true about Indian religions and their founders. What was so great in Mahavira that he was thought to be the twenty-fourth and the last tirthankara of Jainism?

"He was the contemporary of Gautam Buddha, and there were six others who were all competing vigorously to be the twenty-fourth tirthankara, because it was a tremendously respectable status, and the twenty-fourth is the last for this kalpa.

"A kalpa meansmillions of years are still left. A kalpa means when one existence – the whole universe – goes through the black holes and disappears. Then a second kalpa begins, when the second universe comes into being. Every kalpa lasts for millions of years, and in millions of years only twenty-four tirthankaras are allowed by Jainism. Twenty-three had already happened by the time of Gautam Buddha, obviously.

"Eight persons were competitors – and I consider competition to be absolutely irreligious. The very idea of competition is violent; the very idea of competition is full of greed, full of ego. It is nothing but a hidden politics: you want a certain prestige, you are longing for respectability. All those eight philosophers and thinkers are guilty of being competitive – and they were all teaching against competition. Hence I call them all hypocrites."