Re: The Three Gods

I also used to enjoy puzzles when I was young. When I was under 20, I had an inferiority complex and I avoided puzzles because I was afraid that I would turn out to be slow and dim-witted, both in my own eyes and in everyone else's eyes. Later I heard something about myself, but I still felt inferior. I remember when I borrowed a puzzle book from a library: it was quite thick and full of these international puzzles. I decided that I try to solve as many puzzles as I can without seeing the answers that were in the end of the book. To my delight I was able to solve most of them.

Many decades have passed and now I remember only two of them: they must have been on the first few pages. :)

"A man set up a camp, walked ten kilometres to the south, turned and walked ten kilometres to the east, turned and walked ten kilometres to the north. He had come back to his camp. He saw a bear and shot it. What color was the bear?"

"In the Wild West a man went to a saloon and ordered a glass of water. The barman reached under the desk, took a gun and shouted to the man: Hands up! The customer said, Thank you. Why?"

Heh heh, I am afraid these two are quite easy, but right now they are the only ones I can remember. Of course there were variations of your puzzle there - it is an ancient one and there are many versions of it.

In the last few years I've not been interested in puzzles because they just remind me that in the intellectual field I have something much more important to do, I have one hard final puzzle to solve, and solving it might be much more useful to me than all the other puzzles together. Hint: writing.

Maybe I'm not interested in it any more because I know that my main problems are not intellectual at all. Some other problems have become much more urgent and important.

(Btw, the beginning of your puzzle is misleading. "A child walked in one day and asked the statue on the left, behind which sat a priest:
'Who sitteth next to thee?' The reply was: 'The God of Truth'". The priest in this puzzle is totally irrelevant.)