They KNOW it’s sinful

I once heard that Srila Prabhupada called Oxford’s Professor Zaehner, now deceased, a “demon.” And tradition in ISKCON wisdom has it that Srila Prabhupada said words to this effect: “He liked it. He didn’t mind being called a demon. He even admitted it.” Interestingly, in a 1973 London lecture on the first verse, first chapter of the Gita, Srila Prabhupada, when he was talking about Dhrtarastra, told us, “So this is the position of the materialistic person. A materialistic person knows that he is sinful. A materialistic person knows that whatever he is doing is wrong, but he cannot check. Just like the thief. A thief knows that if he commits stealing, he will be arrested, he will be punished. He knows. Because he heard from lawbooks, from other sources, and he has also seen that a thief is arrested and he is taken by the police for being punished. So we have got two kinds of experiences: by hearing and by seeing directly. In Bengali it is called, dekha-suna. The two kinds of experience: one by seeing, practically experiencing, hand to hand; another by hearing. So one who is intelligent, he gets his experience simply by hearing from the right source. That is nice.”