Totalitarianist

I'm getting tired and sick of these retards quoting Einstein out of context and concluding he's a theist, or even worse, "deeply" religious.

From a letter:

"I am, of course, and have always been an Atheist.... I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an Agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional Atheist whose fervour is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our being."

IvanK

He was certainly no typical theist, and to call him "deeply religious" would indeed be a stretch. But this is the same man who said, "God does not play dice with the Universe" and asserted that there was order in the cosmos that human beings could discover. I'd have to put him down as a Deist myself. But it's not surprising that people who need to believe that Einstein (or Jefferson or Adams or Washington or Franklin) were devout Christian believers can underth quotations that seem at first glance to support their views.

Totalitarianist

Out of context. What he really meant was, "Everything isn't random."

Einstein liked his popularity.

A deist?

Then how do you explain:

"I am, of course, and have always been an Atheist"

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brighid

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.
Albert Einstein

The following is an excerpt Albert Einstein's Autobiographical Notes, Open Court Publishing Company, LaSalle and Chicago, Illinois, 1979. These paragraphs appear on pp 3 & 5.

Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking. The contemplation of this world beckoned as a liberation, and I soon noticed that many a man whom I had learned to esteem and to admire had found inner freedom and security in its pursuit. The mental grasp of this extra-personal world within the frame of our capabilities presented itself to my mind, half consciously, half unconsciously, as a supreme goal. Similarly motivated men of the present and of the past, as well as the insights they had achieved, were the friends who could not be lost. The road to this paradise was not as comfortable and alluring as the road to the religious paradise; but it has shown itself reliable, and I have never regretted having chosen it.

This article is a speech by Albert Einstein to the German League of Human Rights, Berlin, in the autumn of 1932. This short speech appears in the Appendix of Einstein by Michael White and John Gribbin, Dutton, Penguin Books USA Inc., New York, 1994, p. 262.
Our situation on this earth seems strange. Every one of us appears here involuntarily and uninvited for a short stay, without knowing the whys and the wherefore. In our daily lives we only feel that man is here for the sake of' others, for those whom we love and for many other beings whose fate is connected with our own.I am often worried at the thought that my life is based to such a large extent on the work of my fellow human beings and I am aware of my great indebtedness to them.I do not believe in freedom of the will. Schopenhauer's words: 'Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills' accompany me in all situations throughout my life and reconcile me with the actions of others even if they are rather painful to me. This awareness of the lack of freedom of will preserves me from taking too seriously myself and my fellow men as acting and deciding individuals and from losing my temper ....The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavour in art and science. 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. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that there is.

Brighid

Panta Pei

I love a mystery

Einstein was an enigma and definitely not anywhere close to being a christian. For, me, that's simply good enough

Koyaanisqatsi

Especially since he was raised Jewish.

Totalitarianist

Irreligious Jewish

He become Catholic when he was twelve, but that lasted only two years, when he realised the absurdities of the Bible

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Totalitarianist

Either way, Einstein was, minus two years of Catholicism, an Atheist.

Edit: A comma

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Panta Pei

"minus two years of Catholicism"

Only two years

Lucky genius <img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" />

Totalitarianist

What? You were Catholic?