On God: An Uncommon Conversation by Norman Mailer, Michael Lennon Page A

people you know nothing about. And yet you have Fundamentalists carrying on about abortion, speaking of it as thwarting God’s will. What does it have to do with God’s will if you kill a thousand people in one minute with gas? Or destroy hundreds of thousands in an instant of atomic manmade lightning from the sky? What does that do to God’s will?
    We might assume that God, like us, is doing the best that can be done under the circumstances. God is our Creator. God put us here. We are God’s artistic vision, we are God’s children, if you will, and it’s not a good parent who looks always to control the child. The mark of a good parent is that he or she can take joy in the moment when a developing child begins to outstrip the parent. God is immensely powerful but is
not
All-Powerful. God is powerful enough to give us lightning and thunder and extraordinary sunsets, incredible moments where we appreciate God’s sense of beauty. But if God is All-Powerful, then how can you begin to explain the monstrosities of modern history? There are theological arguments by great theologians that these horrors are to test us. But this reduces our concept of God to a stage director who says, “Let the actors follow the script. Do not give them access to the playwright.”
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    In one of our earlier conversations, you said humans were created by someone or something not unlike ourselves. So we are then, in some way, created in the image of God?
    Yes. I believe that.
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    Doesn’t that suggest we are more good than evil?
    Potentially more good. When a good man and a good woman have a child, there’s every reason to believe that child will be a good person. But it’s not guaranteed. Good parents can have evil children.
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    If we’re created in God’s image and we’re potentially good but then choose evil, perhaps we were evil all along.
    Look at your phrase—“evil all along.” If, at Creation, the Devil was present and entered us as well, then what we speak of as original sin can be seen as God’s obligatory collaboration with the Devil. We were born good and evil.
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    Fifty-fifty?
    The point is, whether it’s fifty-fifty, sixty-forty, seventy-thirty, the odds change in each of us because there’s an intense war that goes on forever, not only between God and the Devil but—I’ve said this before—God and the Devil as they war within us. We make our own bargains with Them. God and the Devil do not have the resources to be in complete control of us all the time. It isn’t as if we walk through a normal day, and there’s God on one shoulder and the Devil on the other—not at all. They come to us when we attract their attention, because it affects Their interest as well as ours. What I use as the notion behind these assumptions that divine energy is analogous to human energy—it is not inexhaustible. God and the Devil are each obliged to manage their own economies of energy, which is to say that they will give more attention to certain elements of human behavior than to others. Very often, they withdraw from certain people. Too much is being given, too little is coming back.
    Given this supposition, I feel more ready to make an approach to the question of ethics. It must be obvious in all I’ve said so far that I not only am an existentialist but would go so far as to say that we do not know our nature. We only find out about ourselves as we proceed through life. And as we do, we open more questions.
    Jean Malaquais once made a splendid remark—at least for me—during the course of a lecture. He was a brilliant lecturer, and in the middle of a verbal flight—this was at the New School—some kid said bitterly, “You never give us answers. You only pose questions.” And Jean