Einstein Letter: Belief In God "Childish"

[greggh]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/1 ... 01626.html

Albert Einstein described belief in God as "childish superstition" and said Jews were not the chosen people, in a letter to be sold in London this week, an auctioneer said Tuesday.

"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish."

"For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions," he said.

"And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people."

And he added: "As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."

This doesn't quite square with his previous statements...

Previously the great scientist's comments on religion -- such as "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind" -- have been the subject of much debate, used notably to back up arguments in favour of faith.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting.

[jelkimantis]

Einstein was apparently scitzophenic <sp> ? I know that the article in our paper noted that Enstein was frequently changing his view of the supernatural. It might just be that he said what he wanted to say to whomever he was talking.

He's a really smart guy, but I find it very interesting that modern science tries very hard to make smart guys (like hawking) seem atheistic, when they're agnostic at best...

jsl

[allix]

Einstein was also involved with communism and the FBI kept a record that grew up to 1,427 pages.

http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/einstein.htm

He also rejected becoming Israel's second president , which proberly has something to with his communist views as they are opposites.

Yevsektsiya (alternative spelling: Yevsektsia), Russian: ЕвСекция, the abbreviation of the phrase "Еврейская секция" (Yevreyskaya sektsiya) was the Jewish section of the Soviet Communist party which opposed the Bund and Zionist parties. The Yevsektsiya referred to these religious Jewish organizations as "bourgeois nationalists" and instead sought to popularize Marxism among the Jewish working class. An important aim of the Yevsektsiya was to mobilize the Jewish diaspora in favor of the Soviet regime. The founding conference of Yevsektsiya took place on October 20, 1918.[1] For most of its existence, the Yevsektsya was headed by Semyon Dimanstein.

Persons of Jewish origin were disproportionately represented in the Russian revolutionary leadership. However, most of them were hostile to traditional Jewish culture and Jewish political parties, and adamantly opposed to "Jewish cultural particularism". Yevsektsiya members were sometimes derogatorily called Yevseki (pl.).

The Yevsektsia was disbanded in 1929, after the creation of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast. Many of its members perished in the Great Purge. Dimanstein was arrested and received death sentence in 1938 and was executed. He was rehabilitated posthumously in 1955, 2 years after the death of Joseph Stalin.

[edit]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevsektsiya

[walter_mellon]

@jelkimantis: Surveys have shown that as many as 96% of biologists are atheists. Most scientists who are atheists adopt a position of "I don't believe there is a God". This is quite different from making the assertion "There is no God", but is also different from the usual definition of agnosticism. No serious scientist would claim to have testable evidence of God's existence. While Einstein gave many different answers to questions about religion, he seems clearly not to believe in God as formulated in Christianity, and would fall into the first category of atheists.

[Wally Balljacker]

Einstein rejected belief in a personal god, but he wasn't an atheist. IMO, he sounds like a pantheist, although he outright denied that label,

"I'm not an atheist and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza's pantheism, but admire even more his contributions to modern thought because he is the first philosopher to deal with the soul and the body as one, not two separate things."

From an interview, quoted in 'Glimpses of the Great' by G. S. Viereck (Macauley, New York, 1930).

[walter_mellon]

@Wally: I guess more hairsplitting is in order. In our culture, atheism is presumed to mean disbelief in the Judeo/Christian God. Pat Robertson would look at Einstein's almost mystical formulation and call it atheism, whether Einstein agreed with him or not. It is in this narrow sense that I spoke of Einstein as an atheist. I personally would have a hard time classifying what Einstein described as "theism", so I would probably agree with Robertson on this one (shudder). Maybe classifying Einstein as atheist or not is a fruitless effort. He has no more scientific evidence for his mysticism than the most sweaty, drool-spitting fundamentalist bible-thumper has for his.