Lao Tzu says in Tao Te Ching that when the world was really religious there were no saints. When there were saints immediately sinners appeared. So the saint cannot exist without the sinner. That means they are joined together somehow, they are part of one reality. Make one disappear and the other will disappear automatically.

It is just like hot and cold; make hot disappear completely and cold will disappear, because cold is nothing but a degree of hot. Make cold disappear completely and hot will disappear, because the difference is only of degrees, the quality is the same. And saints and sinners are just like hot and cold, they are degrees on the same thermometer. Destroy one, the other is destroyed immediately – they exist as polarities. People go on asking, “If God is good then why is there evil in this world?” God cannot exist without the evil, the evil is because God is. The light cannot exist without darkness, neither can the darkness exist without light.

For Christianity this has been such a big problem that for twenty centuries Christian theologians have been continuously working on this one problem: why does evil exist if God is good? They have not solved it, and they will never be able to solve it because they cannot see the simple reality that good and bad are two degrees of the same phenomenon. So they have to divide. They say, “All good belongs to God, and all bad belongs to the Devil.”

And from where does this Devil come? If the Devil comes from God himself then why so much fuss about it? He belongs to God. If the Devil is a separate source from God then two Gods exist in this world, and then there is no necessity that the good God will win. The whole situation seems to be otherwise. If the Devil is also a separate source there is every possibility that he will win – because he is winning ninety-nine percent of the time every day! If they are separate sources then it is better to worship the Devil, because you are on the losing side if you go on worshipping God.

So Christian theologians cannot say that the Devil is a separate source; they say that the Devil was also an angel of God, but then he disobeyed. They go on shifting the problem. Then from where does this disobedience come? If it comes from the Devil himself then he becomes a separate source. Or if God himself suggests it to him then it becomes a play, a game.

When I was saying last night that life is a game, a play, and God is playing this whole cosmic joke, one friend immediately wrote a letter saying that it cannot be conceived that Jesus being crucified is just God’s play. The crucifixion of Jesus cannot be conceived of as just God’s play, it must have some purpose.