"Those I call internal proofs. There is no need for any outer proof. For example, there are passages in the Vedas in which a brahmin is praying to God, 'Increase the milk of my cows, so that this year's crop will be the best, compared to my neighbor.'

"Now, what business has God to write these things? And if God is writing this, then to whom is he praying? There are other passages in which a brahmin is praying to God, 'Destroy all my enemies. Kill them. Uproot them completely, entirely.' These are human minds. There is no way to prove to anybody that God has written these things. And the Vedas are full of such rubbish – ninety percent, just rubbish.

"If somehow it is proved that God wrote these Vedas, then he should be in a mental asylum. What is holy in it? Asking that 'my enemies should be killed, uprooted entirely' – what is holy in it? And what is holy in it, that 'my crop should be better than my neighbor's crops'? – certainly human, but nothing holy. But Hindus worship those books without even bothering what they are worshipping.

"So the first thing to remember: there are no holy books, there are only books well written or not well written. Yes, there are masterpieces, but none of the so-called holy books comes into the category of a masterpiece. I want to insist on that fact too: that not only are they not holy, according to human standards they are not even masterpieces.

"For example, Mikhail Naimy's book, The Book of Mirdad, or Khalil Gibran's book, The Prophet, or Rabindranath's book, Gitanjali, or Fyodor Dostoevsky's book, Brothers Karamazov – these are masterpieces. None of the holy books – the Vedas, the Gita, the Koran, the Bible, the Torah – no holy book even comes near to these masterpieces. So they are not only not holy, they are not even worth calling masterpieces.

"But each religion insists – because its whole business depends on that insistence – the book has to be holy, otherwise who is going to listen? And the book decides what you have to do, what you have not to do."