Man’s real problem is not God; that poor fellow has never been seen after those first six days when he created the world. Since then nobody knows where he is – whether he is sick, or got so tired of creating the world in six days that the seventh day he rested…that is allowed. But what happened on Monday? On office days you should be back. Since then he has been on holiday…it is an eternity. Most probably he died.

But the devil is still alive, and shows himself again and again. You cannot conceive of Adolf Hitler in any other way than an incarnation of the devil; you cannot think of Nadirshah and his great company, Tamerlane and Genghis Khan, as anything other than incarnations of the devil.

I remember one case…Nadirshah attacked India – and he was a man who enjoyed killing people so greatly that his whole life he was killing and killing. One night he asked his soldiers to bring the most beautiful woman of the area, so they brought a prostitute from a nearby village. In India, prostitutes are a little different than in the West. In the West they are only sex objects. In the East they are artists, dancers, singers; their being sex objects is secondary.

She danced, and Nadirshah was very happy. The night was almost coming to an end when Nadirshah said, “Now I want to go to sleep, you can go back.”

He gave immense rewards to the woman, but the woman said, “It is dark outside. With so much money, so many diamonds…I am a woman and alone, and the path goes through a dark forest – I cannot go.”

Nadirshah told his soldiers, “You go ahead of her, and go on burning everything that you find – forest, village, anything. Make it a light.”

Nobody has made light that way – just a small torch would have done. But Nadirshah had such a devilish mind: he burned seven villages and the whole forest to make it almost look like day. He told the prostitute, “Now you can go. And you will remember that you had come to see not some Tom, Dick, Harry; you had come to see the great emperor, Nadir Shah. He can make the night into day.” Thousands of villagers were burned alive. You cannot say such a man represents God in any way.

The devil is spread all over your history; even today, the devil is ruling you. The devil is a politician, has always been a politician. God is a nice guy – if he exists – very gentlemanly, has remained almost anonymous, almost a nobody. If one has to think about who is more important, indubitably it is the devil.

I would like him to be a woman, because the woman has many devilish qualities. But then God will have to be a man, because the polarity…both cannot be women, both cannot be men. If both were women, there would have been constant struggle and fight and jealousy and envy. If both were men, there would have been homosexuality and AIDS. So that is not acceptable; they have to be polar opposites.

My feeling is that the devil is man and God is woman – at least he has been functioning as very womanly. The devil is very aggressive, and God goes on retreating.

So your question is very important theologically – although in reality they both don’t exist. Hypotheses cannot be male or female: two plus two is four – do you think it is male or female? It is just neutral, it has no genital difference.