Wed 14 May 2008
Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY
From a recently unearthed Albert Einstein letter, written in 1954 :
… 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. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. 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. As far as my experience goes, they are also 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.
In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality otherwise accepted, as a Jew the priviliege of monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza recognized with all incision, probably as the first one. And the animistic interpretations of the religions of nature are in principle not annulled by monopolisation. With such walls we can only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are not furthered by them. On the contrary.
From an excellent short article by Gary Suttle, Einstein further explains his ‘religious’ beliefs :
” My religion…is really the universe–in other words, nature, which is our reflection of the universe.”
When asked if he believed in God, Einstein answered “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists.” Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677), the renowned philosopher of pantheism, held that God and Nature are one in the same.
A deep sense of mystery pervades Einstein’s outlook. “The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion…. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness….one cannot help but be in awe when (one) contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure.
In a beautifully touching stage show in the mid-1980s, comedian Robin Williams summed up Einstein’s words with this bit of paraphrasing : “My sense of God is my sense of wonder about the universe”.
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