Dr. Suess in his full-blown dementia years, responds:
After a long pause, Kham said: “I agree that you can’t build a good house on a poor foundation, and God was building more than a house—he was building a world of billions of people, and loyalty to the owner would be vital. Why, that’s what is wrong with this world! There is no common loyalty to someone who has a right to it. Why, even I can see that, and I am just beginning to believe in a God!” “But look here, Kham,” interrupted Oi. “Did you notice what it says here? The serpent—that’s the Devil, by the way—said to the woman: ‘You will not die because God knows that on eating from the tree your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and bad.’” Kham looked puzzled. “I don’t quite see the point here.” “Well,” said Oi, “wasn’t the Devil in effect saying to that woman that God was lying to her in order to keep her in subjection and that she could be independent of God and make her own rules?”
Kham went silent for a long time, but he was thinking about what he had read. It gave him a new slant on the cause of misery and suffering, and more important, a way out. His mind went back to the time he had read those letters from his father. At first he had been exhilarated, but afterward he felt a bigger void than ever before. He felt he had just had a glimpse or a taste of something that had whetted his appetite and no more; leaving him with a yearning for something he could not define, for answers to questions he could not formulate. He still remembered the time before he was married, when he had been very unhappy. He had never contemplated suicide, as many did, but he had felt that life was really miserable, with no way out. He had read, or been told—he could not remember which—that this life with its miseries was repayment for individual sins committed in a previous life. But he wondered about that. It seemed contrary to justice. Why, he could not even remember what he had done wrong in his own previous life—and yet he was now being punished for it! It was like being sent to jail and yet not being told what law he had broken. How could justice enforce punishment if the punishment in itself was not just? How could he avoid repeating those sins if he did not even know what they were? It had all seemed to leave him with a sense of futility and hopelessness, with no one to call on for help. Now he realized what the yearning was. It was for a source of help and enlightenment. Reading those generous and stimulating letters from his father had sharpened his awareness of the need of help from outside. That letter from God that he had just been reading had begun to satisfy that yearning. He sensed a degree of happiness that he had never had before. It could become a permanent feature of life, never to be marred by sickness or death—if only those letters were actually from the Creator.
“I was just pondering,” said Kham after a long period of silence, “over what you mentioned earlier that those girls had told you: that man was made to live on the earth. Well, what we have just been reading bears that out. As the human family grew, that original garden would have been enlarged gradually until the whole earth would have become a garden. The fact that the first man and woman were cast out of the gardenized portion seems to show that they had lost the privilege of even temporarily staying in that perfected, or should we say tamed, portion of the earth, but were permitted to live for a while in the untamed part.” “True,” replied Oi, “they were cast out of God’s family and lived on the earth like squatters. But you see what it says next, that ‘they had children.’ What would their standing be in God’s sight?” “I suppose they would just be squatters like Adam and Eve,” said Kham, “and would be tainted with the rebellious attitude of their parents, although they hadn’t each personally rejected God.” “That’s true,” agreed Oi, “and Jehovah, who is such a merciful God, has promised to provide a way for these squatter children to have their taint covered over and to be brought back into his family so that he becomes their Father.” “So that’s what you meant by finding a Father, Oi. Mankind would cease to be squatters and join God’s family.