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An Encounter with God

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Goa has a new reason to be proud, as the Hauns Sangeet Natya Mandal, Ponda, has pioneered the staging of an adaptation of Raymond Smullyan’s dialogue between man and his Maker on the dilemma of possessing free will. The play is called Is God a Taoist? and is based on Smullyan’s book The Tao is Silent . Raymond Smullyan has had a singular career course that has ranged from stage magic to authoring books on Taoism. The nonagenarian polymath is acclaimed for his manifold talents as concert pianist, logician, Taoist philosopher, mathematician, puzzle maker, and magician. In his book, published in 1977, Smullyan gave an understanding of Eastern philosophy to the Western world for the first time. It is Smullyan’s surmise that the Taoist is one who enjoys what he has rather than looking for that which is not in his grasp. The dialogue begins with man urging God to take away his free will, which he sees as the bane of his existence and the reason for his sinfulness. Through a pattern of reaso