“When things go wrong, it is always easy to blame God. But when things go right, we always praise our own industriousness. But don’t you see it’s the same? God gave us free will. There cannot be strings attached. If he interferes at all, then that limits our free will. Like the old saying about teaching a man to fish, God gave us the tools to help ourselves. But while tools can be used to build, they can also be used to destroy. Just the same, man has the ability to do good, but he also has the same ability to do great evil. And you know as well as I do that this, as you say, the nightmare world in which we live, it was not created by God but by man.”

“And so your god sees that as being fair? For the entire world to be punished for the sins of the few?”

“We were all cast out of Eden for the sins of but a single person. You look at this, and all you see is the evil that has been created. But can you not also see the good that has been done? The people, complete strangers, coming togeth