You can laugh at it, but do you think…? People have been fighting over the existence of God-is it in any way different from the buffalo? People have been fighting over how many hells there are. The Hindus believe in one hell; the Jainas believe in three hells, because according to them one hell is not justified for all kinds of criminals. Somebody has just stolen a chicken, and somebody has killed a man. You cannot put both the men in the same hell. That will be unjustified. So they have three hells, according to your sin.

But Gautam Buddha had seven. He says that in three you cannot categorize all the crimes; at least seven are needed. But you will be surprised, another philosopher, contemporary to Mahavira and Gautam Buddha, Ajit Keshkambal, had seventy-seven. He said, “Unless you have that number of hells, it will be very difficult to categorize.”

Now, nobody knows where this hell is…and they were fighting tooth and nail! And for centuries their philosophers have been fighting, trying to explain their position. For example Hindus have explained that the hell is one, but we can make divisions in the hell. You can make as many divisions as you want in one hell, what is the need of seventy-seven hells? Just make seventy-seven divisions in one hell. But you don’t think that these people are idiots; these are great philosophers. But their problems about God…Nobody has met God, it is purely a concept.

And there are religions who don’t believe in God. Jainism has no God, Buddhism has no God, Taoism has no God. God is not an essential phenomenon for any religion to exist. And then there are different descriptions of God. The Old Testament says that God is a very angry God, very jealous and very temperamental-don’t annoy him. And God himself is reported to have said in the Old Testament, “I am a very jealous God. And remember it, I am your father, not your uncle. Don’t expect any nice things from me.”

And Jesus says, “God is love.”

Hindus say, “God is pure justice”-because love cannot be just; it may love someone and forgive him, it may not love someone, or even dislike someone and punish him unnecessarily for sins that he has not committed. Love is not reliable. God has to be just, a magistrate with no likings, no dislikings.

This anecdote, when Ma Tzu says, “There’s no water here, and no ship - what am I supposed to explain?” has all these implications. Then don’t get engaged in abstract concepts-those arguments and philosophical discussions are unending, and nobody has come to any conclusion.

The Christian God has a small family: the only begotten son, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost-a strange family with no woman in it, unless this Holy Ghost is capable of functioning as a woman also. But certainly the Holy Ghost is not a woman because he is responsible for making Mary the virgin pregnant with Jesus Christ. And on the other hand, the Christians say that the Holy Ghost and God are one. So why separate them just for the sake of saving God from corrupting and raping an innocent girl? If they are one, then why not say, “God impregnated Mary”; why not make it straightforward? Why should God go via the Holy Ghost? Sometimes I think the Holy Ghost must be God’s sexual machinery. So he is one, yet he remains outside and the Holy Ghost does the whole work.