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believe in the devil too. They have to, it is just a logical necessity. And the religions who don't believe in God don't believe in the devil either. For example, Jainism has no God, therefore there is no devil. It is simply out of the question. But all the religions that believe in God have to accept his polar opposite, the devil.
Why this necessity? Because existence always needs a polarity. Birth is polarized by death, love is polarized by hate, compassion is polarized by cruelty. Look around life. Everything has its polar opposite, and if you can take away the polar opposite then the other will also disappear. They can exist only together.
What is a good thought and what is a bad thought? And how can you separate them? Only a teacher does not know that the final approach towards your being needs all thoughts to disappear -- it does not matter whether they are good or bad. We are not talking here of morality; we are talking here of authentic religion.
Of course in morality there are good thoughts and bad thoughts, and they are all arbitrary. Because for Mohammedans, to have four wives is not a bad thought, but to everybody else in the world the very idea of having four wives is a bad thought.
To the ancient Hindus, even a woman having five husbands was not a bad thought; the woman who had five husbands is worshiped as one of the five great women of India! Of course five husbands is not the right number because the weekend remains -- what to do with the weekend? Every day for five days the poor woman had to change husbands, and two days were just a holiday. So the weekend is not something new and American; it is very ancient and Indian! Nobody has condemned it as an ugly situation. No Hindu thinker or philosopher or theologian has condemned it; it was acceptable.
Yudhisthir, the eldest of the five brothers who shared one wife, is thought of by Hindus as one of the most religious men that has ever lived on the earth. He is called Dharmaraj, the "king of religiousness". And this fellow Yudhisthir was a compulsive gambler; he gambled to the extent that he staked his whole kingdom, his whole treasury, and finally he staked his wife!
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