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about it. The question cannot even exist if there is no existence, nor can the questioner.
I would like to make it clear that when I say God, I mean existence as such. God is not a thing among other things, God is total thingness. To say that the table exists is the same as saying that the table is God. To say that you exist is the same as saying that you are God. God is the existence. God is isness, the quality of isness, the quality of existence.
First of all, God is not a thing. Secondly, God is not a person because the total cannot be a person. Personality is a relationship. Alone, totally alone, you will not be a person at all, you will be existence itself. That is why those who are seeking the divine tend to go into loneliness. In this way, they can cease to be persons and can become one with existence. Aloneness, absolute aloneness, is a step toward jumping into the abyss of existence.
God is not a person because there is nothing opposite to him, nothing distinct from him. God cannot say "I" because there is no other that exists as thou. He cannot be related to anyone. He is the whole, so all relationships exist in him and cannot exist beyond him.
So if God is not a person, there is no question of any responsibility. If evil exists, it exists. No one is responsible for it. The total cannot be responsible for it.
Responsibility implies that there is a person who can be responsible. A child of four cannot be taken to court because he is not yet a person and therefore cannot be held responsible for anything that he may have done. He is so innocent that even the sense of personality, the sense of ego, is not there. He is not responsible at all, because responsibility comes with ego. Existence has no ego at all -- God has no ego at all -- so you cannot make him responsible for any evil that exists.
But the human mind is very cunning. First we invent a personified God -- we give God a personality -- and then we make him responsible for what happens. We go on creating problems that are not problems at all but only linguistic fallacies. Ninety-nine percent of philosophy consists only of linguistic fallacies. If you call the
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