Einstein on religion: all a lie

From today’s New York Times: Einstein Letter on God Sells for $404,000:

.....From the grave, Albert Einstein poured gasoline on the culture wars between science and religion this week.
.....A letter the physicist wrote in 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, in which he described the Bible as “pretty childish” and scoffed at the notion that the Jews could be a “chosen people,” sold for $404,000 at an auction in London….
…..
.....Diana L. Kormos-Buchwald, a historian at the California Institute of Technology and head of the Einstein Papers project, said she was not surprised that the Gutkind letter, which was known to Einstein scholars, fetched such a high price.
.....“It is an important expression of Einstein’s thoughts and views on religion, on Judaism, on his views about God and religious texts,” she wrote in an e-mail message. She said the letter, which was not written for publication, was “concise and unvarnished” and more straightforward than the metaphors he usually turned to in public.
…..
.....Einstein, as he says in his autobiographical notes, lost his religion at the age of 12, concluding that it was all a lie, and he never looked back. But he never lost his religious feeling about the apparent order of the universe or his intuitive connection with its mystery, which he savored. “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is its comprehensibility,” he once said.
.....“If something is in me that can be called religious,” he wrote in another letter, in 1954, “then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as science can reveal it.”
.....Einstein consistently characterized the idea of a personal God who answers prayers as naive, and life after death as wishful thinking. But his continual references to God — as a metaphor for physical law; in his famous rebuke to quantum mechanics, “God doesn’t play dice”; and in lines like the endlessly repeated, “ Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind” — has led some wishful thinkers to try to put him in the camp of some kind of believer or even, not long ago, to paint him as an advocate of intelligent design.
.....Trying to distinguish between a personal God and a more cosmic force, Einstein described himself as an “agnostic” and “not an atheist,” which he associated with the same intolerance as religious fanatics. “They are creatures who — in their grudge against the traditional ‘opium for the people’ — cannot bear the music of the spheres.”
.....The problem of God, he said, “is too vast for our limited minds.”
.....Einstein’s latest words offer scant comfort to the traditionally faithful.
.....In the letter, according to the A.P. account, he wrote that “the word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.”
.....As for his fellow Jews, he said that Judaism, like all other religions, was “an incarnation of the most childish superstitions.”
.....He claimed a deep affinity with the Jewish people, he said, but “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.”

There’s lots of religion at the SOCCCD—inserted during public meetings especially by Mr. Tom Fuentes, former communications director for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange—you know, the one with all of those sex-abusing priests, at least one of whom Tom supervised.

Check out this brief video that presents one instructor's plea to replace prayer with moments of silence (2005):


Typical prayer at recent SOCCCCD board meeting (at 0:53):


FOR SOME FUN:

Newly released UFO FILES from the UK government (video)

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