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Einstein Letter Critical of Religion To Be Auctioned On EBay
cheesecake23 writes "In an admirably concise piece in The Atlantic, Rebecca J. Rosen summarizes Einstein's subtle views on religion and profound respect for the inexplicable, along with the news that a letter handwritten by the legendary scientist that describes the Bible as a 'collection of honorable, but still primitive legends' and 'pretty childish' will be auctioned off on eBay over the next two weeks. Bidding will begin at $3 million."
Um, something about Jesus, Jews and a cross, keeps coming to mind.
I'm fairly certain that were Einstein still alive, he would be shaking his head at such ridiculousness.
Also Einstein said:
"Being a lover of freedom, when the revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but, no, the universities immediately were silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks. . . ."
"Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly."
ORIGINAL SOURCE (you need a paid subscription): http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,765103,00.html
ALTERNATIVE SOURCE: http://www.thinkingchristian.net/2008/12/time-christians-in-germany-during-world-war-ii/
Um, something about Jesus, Jews and a cross, keeps coming to mind.
You must mean the famous joke:
What happens when you drive nails through the hands of the son of a jewish carpenter? He gets very cross...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Prove it. Saying you feel it in your soul doesn't count. A book with very little forensic evidence backing it up, while concurrently having ample evidence of several rewrites by parties with something to gain over the centuries also doesn't count.
No... why did Jesus get crucified? He forgot the safe word.
Jesus promised the end of all wicked people.
Thor promised the end of all ice giants.
I don't see many ice giants around.
Actually it's not a "book" as such. It is distinctly a collection of stories and letters that were at one stage compiled and bound together. The original authors never intended for them to be in a book. Many of the letters were probably never even meant for more than one person. Go figure.
What "ample evidence" is there that any individual part was rewritten?
All praise Thor!!
Urk is a fishing village in Holland known to be part of the bible belt. They were also FIERCE resisters, their fishing vessels carrying many a Jew and downed allied airmen to safety. There reasoning wasn't so much a love of Jews and others they helped to safety but a pigheaded resistance to being told what to do. They knew wrong and right and nazism was wrong, end of story. They were good men, who did do something.
But I wouldn't call them lovers of freedom, just people who when pushed, push back, by instinct. They would also have had nothing to do with mass religion, claiming "protestants" are one group is damn silly. Most consider the people in the next village to be weirdos.
Meanwhile the pope at the time was thought of to be a good man too. He just didn't do anything.
Mussoline and the holocaust were strange bed fellows, it has to be remembered that nazism and facism are not the same thing. And Mussolini was a fascist, not a nazi. He regonized Jews were part of Italy and should be left undisturbed, Jews were members of his party in quite high positions. It is only with the increasing power of Germany that this changed, resulting in Jews being stripped of citizenship rights in 1939.
This was not at all popular with the Italian fascists and the pope even send a strong letter of critism on this. To increasingly appease Hitler, Jews were started to be round up in Italian controlled areas and send to labor camps but Mussonlini until the Italy surrender refused to send them to German controlled extermination camps. The Germans complained that Italy and its territories were becoming a save haven in Europe for Jews.
After Italy surrendered, Mussonlini was freed by the Germans and they took over control over the remaining Italian land and started to put their holocaust plan into action. Italian soldiers who were not captured by Allied forced found themselves improsoned by the Germans, Italy very much became subjegated to full German control and all that entailed.
The role of religion in WW2 is far from clean, but it is not as simple as some Discovery Channel programs would like you to believe.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Evidence of alterations come from textual analysis. For example, some of the alterations use phrases that were in use much later than the stories were supposedly written down.
Albert hit the religion nail on the head in the last paragraph of his famous speech "My credo", which he gave to the German League of Human Rights in late 1932.
My Credo
It is a special blessing to belong among those who can and may devote their best energies to the contemplation and exploration of objective and timeless things. How happy and grateful I am for having been granted this blessing, which bestows upon one a large measure of independence from one's personal fate and from the attitude of one's contemporaries. Yet this independence must not inure us to the awareness of the duties that constantly bind us to the past, present and future of humankind at large.
Our situation on this earth seems strange. Every one of us appears here, involuntarily and uninvited, for a short stay, without knowing the why and the wherefore. In our daily lives we feel only 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 troubled by 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 free 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 free will keeps me from taking myself and my fellow men too seriously as acting and deciding individuals, and from losing my temper.
I have never coveted affluence and luxury and even despise them a good deal. My passion for social justice has often brought me into conflict with people, as has my aversion to any obligation and dependence I did not regard as absolutely necessary.
I have a high regard for the individual and an insuperable distaste for violence and fanaticism. All these motives have made me a passionate pacifist and antimilitarist. I am against any chauvinism, even in the guise of mere patriotism.
Privileges based on position and property have always seemed to me unjust and pernicious, as does any exaggerated personality cult. I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I know well the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual have always seemed to me the important communal aims of the state.
Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice keeps me from feeling isolated.
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 of 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 minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: 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 there is.
Einstein - 1932
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The Japanese indeed never went after the Jews, specifically. They did however put civilians from conquered territories into labor camps and had their troops rape women and children for relaxation. Not specifically Jews, just anyone really who they had captured.
They did kill millions of Chinese in their holocaust but their generals were not sickened by a little blood so they never bothered with gas chambers.
Still, I don't think that exactly makes them the nice guys of the axis powers.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
...believed in a "personal god", which includes but is not limited to Christianity.
It's a great wiggle-room definition. Thus, you can be a geek who admires the "glory of God" without having to subscribe to a particular religion or "shape" or sentient-level of creator.
All definitions of god have a huge amount of wiggle room, AKA incoherence. I always thought of Einstein as a pantheist due to his claim of following the god of Spinoza, perhaps though he would be better characterised as an igtheist.
As several commenters on the source article mentioned already, the word "Childish" does not appear in the original text. My German may be rusty but I concur, "Kindish" is not present in the original letter... but lets not let the facts get in the way of a sensational headline...
30 seconds on Google turned up this article and a speech on the subject.
The bible has been in human hands for centuries and copied by hand before printing presses came in. A spelling mistake here, bad handwriting there, the next guy comes along and misreads a word and then 'fixes' the sentence so that it makes sense. I'd be shocked if there was a single page in there that hadn't changed. And that's only accidental changes.
Looking at the things politicians do today, when it's easier to fact-check and catch them out than ever before, I find it completely believable that people just... mis-copied parts of the bible to justify whatever they felt like doing. It's not like people in the year 900 were going to get on Facebook and compare notes with people in other countries. They'd probably never touched a copy of the Bible. Probably couldn't read. A man with a bible could tell people it said anything. Make some changes in his copy, noone would ever know.
Einstein never said that as he confirmed in an unpublished letter: http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/06-01-05/
He said "primitive susperstition". That's way different. You can look it up in the original yourself , it is barely recognizable in the JPG but you can see he said "primitiven Aberglauben" (http://www.auctioncause.com/cf/einstein/images/large.jpg see second picture middle) und nicht "kindisch" which would be childish. Methink the person translating made a bit of creative translation here.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
All religion is insanity. Classification of the specific type of insanity is really beyond the scope of any single person.
Its easier to lump all religion into the one box marked CRAZY. Leave classification to those studying the insane.
Muslim, christian, jew, whatever. you've ALL killed people in the past for not believing in your specific brand of invisible sky wizard insanity. you're all just as bad AND just as crazy as each other. None of you have any high ground to denounce any other religion anymore. ALL OF YOU need to stfu. keep your religious beliefs between you and god and shut the fuck up. Stop making the world a worse place already! you're not helping!
And stop trying to drag atheists every fucking argument about religion. Thats just a strawman and you know it.
Really i don't expect much logic and common sense from you crazies tho.
But still. Stop making the world a worse place.
The bible has been in human hands for centuries and copied by hand before printing presses came in. A spelling mistake here, bad handwriting there, the next guy comes along and misreads a word and then 'fixes' the sentence so that it makes sense. I'd be shocked if there was a single page in there that hadn't changed. And that's only accidental changes.
Of course, The Faithful claim that $DEITY in his glorious omnipotence has kept The Holy Word pure and absolutely identical to The Original.
In common-speek that's a circular proof and can thusly be completely ignored.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
It's really sad, that grown men organize their lives around some rules that an iron age tribe wrote on the skin of dead animals to keep the peace in their tents.
He did a few things back in WWII and later went on to be Pope John Paul the second, I'm sure you've heard about him. He wasn't the only one.
I asked God: "Do you want me to believe in you?" And God told me: "Write the following program, and you will receive my answer." I haven't run the program yet. Maybe I am scared of what it will tell me.
No offense, but I would give those sources more credit if their entire existence wouldn't be completely undermined by saying anything to the contrary.
And if it wasn't completely unrealistic and contradicted by the incredibly well documented existence of Apocrypha, multiple councils to determine the true gospels, and the fact that the Church has always been far more political than religious even if its followers are not.
The reliability of the New Testament is also beyond reproach.
Now there's a scientific attitude.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I am no programmer, but i am guessing its very bad code. No good comments, no explanation of what and why. Just like in the real religion!
DO NOT LET THIS FALL INTO THE HANDS OF RELIGIONSISTS who constantly use out of context quotes by Einstein to "prove" he variously a Christian a religious Jew, sympathetic to Christianity, a fundie, believed in god etc etc etc. none of which he did.
I wouldn't be concerned with minor typographical errors, it's unlikely they could actually result in changed meaning. For the sake of argument, look at the dead sea scrolls, which are thousands of years old, and compare with the modern hebrew bible. What you'll find is that they are largely identical. So even over long spans of time, it seems that minor typographical errors won't add up to significant changes.
The problem areas with the text itself are the time between when the events occurred and when they were written down, and stories that were added to the text after the fact. We know that peoples memories change over time, and the more time passes the more details they fill in. So, it seems that the different authors filled in the details a little differently. But the details are hardly the point of the stories they wrote. The link you provided points out stories we know weren't included in the earliest manuscripts of the text, but since we don't have the originals, there may be (and probably are) others.
However, the real problem one which applies to all forms of human communication. The foundation of communication is shared experience. We experience concepts and then learn to associate words with them. But we all have different experiences, and have associated them to words differently. That means that when one person talks, what he's saying and what the other person's hearing are going to be different conceptually. I have an identical twin brother and even with him, I run into these kind of misunderstandings.
So when it comes to reading the Bible, some of which is probably 3500 years old, there are going to be some language barriers even if it's "perfectly" translated. The person writing it would have had many experiences that most of us will never have.
You are way wrong on this.
Transmission
B. The Masoretes
The Masoretic scribes (A.D. 500-1000) in charge of the Old Testament manuscript copying used a very meticulous system of transcription and had a deep reverence for the text. God used their almost obsessive respect for the text to preserve the text’s accuracy. They had specific rules on the type of ink and the quality and size of parchment sheets. No individual letter could be written down without having looked back at the copy in front of them. The scribe could not write God’s name with a newly dipped pen (lest it blotch) and even if the king should address him, while writing God’s name, he should take no notice of him. They were so meticulous that they counted all the paragraphs, words and even letters, so they could know by counting, if they had done it perfectly. They knew the middle letter of each book so they could count back and see if they had missed anything. . .
D. The Dead Sea Scrolls
Since the oldest complete copy of a Hebrew Old Testament in existence is dated about A.D. 1000, that’s a long time after the originals were written (1450-400 B.C.). But there are portions that date back farther. Most significant are the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were discovered in caves in 1947 by an Arabian shepherd boy. These well-preserved Hebrew text fragments date back to 100 B.C. They include many Bible portions, including some complete books. Their value to the credibility of our Bible is that amazingly, there is virtual agreement between these Hebrew texts and the ones dated 1,100 years later! This proves how accurately the scribes copies for all those years.
The evidence shows that our Old Testaments today are extremely accurate reflections of the original manuscripts.
So how reliable are the manuscripts that all these Bibles are translated from? The evidence is overwhelming and seldom disputed. Manuscripts prepared from different individuals spread over various parts of the Middle East and Mediterranean region agree remarkably with each other. Also, the manuscripts agree with the Septuagint, which was translated to Greek from Hebrew possibly as far back as the 3rd century BC. The Dead Sea scrolls discovered in 1947 also provided a profound testimony to the reliability of the centuries of transmission of the Bible text, as every Old Testament book found was virtually word for word with today's Bible! (the few differences were "obvious slips of the pen or variations in spelling"1).
I see your possibly biased sources and raise you a wikipedia!
According to The Oxford Companion to Archaeology:
The biblical manuscripts from Qumran, which include at least fragments from every book of the Old Testament, except perhaps for the Book of Esther, provide a far older cross section of scriptural tradition than that available to scholars before. While some of the Qumran biblical manuscripts are nearly identical to the Masoretic, or traditional, Hebrew text of the Old Testament, some manuscripts of the books of Exodus and Samuel found in Cave Four exhibit dramatic differences in both language and content. In their astonishing range of textual variants, the Qumran biblical discoveries have prompted scholars to reconsider the once-accepted theories of the development of the modern biblical text from only three manuscript families: of the Masoretic text, of the Hebrew original of the Septuagint, and of the Samaritan Pentateuch. It is now becoming increasingly clear that the Old Testament scripture was extremely fluid until its canonization around A.D. 100.
Sure, wikipedia may not be the best academic source on the planet, but at least the source article above is well cited. Oh, and that doesn't sound like "slips of the pen" to me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_sea_scrolls
And you can't see the problem with believing information published on sites with a vested interest in the bible being reliable?
Various religious people I have spoken to talk about the divine hand of God guiding the translators. A deity who is only "virtually free from any corruption" doesn't sound that good to me.
Actually it's not a "book" as such. It is distinctly a collection of stories and letters that were at one stage compiled and bound together. The original authors never intended for them to be in a book. Many of the letters were probably never even meant for more than one person. Go figure.
What "ample evidence" is there that any individual part was rewritten?
There were religious councils held in europe through the middle-ages that specificaly focused on rewriting parts of the bible so they suited the changing views of church.
I am no programmer, but i am guessing its very bad code. No good comments, no explanation of what and why. Just like in the real religion!
There two most central lines of the code to understand are these:
The first computes a SHA512 hash of a 111 byte buffer. The second checks if the last 64 bytes of that buffer was actually the hash of the buffer itself. Producing a 111 byte string with that property would require you to either find a security problem in SHA512 or perform a brute force computation which is out of reach even for the best know quantum algorithms. So the theory would be, that only God could produce such an input. I say the existence of a weakness in SHA512 is more likely than the existence of God. Hence even if the program did produce any nontrivial output, it doesn't prove the existence of God.
/dev/random, and repeatedly XORs 111 bytes blocks from there until the result contains a NUL character. Looks like some lame approach to ensure that the contents of the buffer is NUL terminated if it is finally printed out (which is never going to happen anyway).
/dev/random are given by God. I don't feel qualified to attempt an answer to that question, since I am already convinced about the non-existence of God, and hence that question makes little sense to me.
Where does the contents of that buffer come from in the first place? It reads data from
One can ask whether the bytes read from
And if anyone STILL thinks about them as nice guys, read about Unit 731
30 seconds on Google turned up this article
Good grief, that's hilarious. Not the article, the comments. I love the whole thread about "lol so your book is wrong and so are everyone else's but it's a fact that the quran is flawless so you must believe its every word".
I love the faithful. They are the source of endless amusement. I'm convinced if they'd just stop and listen to themselves for _one moment_ they'd realise how ridiculous they are.
The premise is flawed in any case. If there is a God and he is powerful, he could just as well shout in a loud voice from the sky. The program appears designed to detect the presence of a weak god, who is able to influence only small things. If a powerful God refuses to shout from the sky every time some arb asks, why should he then influence the /dev/random pseudo random process? Or the path of one program?
I have determined that my sig is indeterminate.
Uh huh. Where are the transitional bible fossils then!?
"Don't worry if you don't believe in God. Just know that God believes in you.
AFAICT, you don't have enough evidence to warrant a knowledge claim. I consider it likely you don't even have enough evidence to make a belief based claim. That only leaves you with a faith based claim. Faith and delusion share the same definition -- eg they are synonyms. What does this tell you?
brandelf -t FreeBSD
If there was a god and it was powerful, then humans wouldn't have needed to invent it. And the evidence that humans did invent it is all over every religion.
I mostly agree with you, until the point of not thinking by themselves. I am religious, and I do learn science and have a very letftiah libertarian way of thinking, so I dont see how can someone say that I dont think by myself, still I might be blind.
Religions can only exist if people accept someone else's story regarding the existence and nature of a mythical being based on no factual evidence whatsoever. People believe in religions because it brings them comfort. But if you accept anything purely on faith and especially if you cannot possibly verify the claims, that is pretty much the definition of not thinking for yourself. You have traded rational and independent thought for comfort. Seems a costly trade to me.
Actually maybe you should read "Misquoting Jesus" by B. Ehrman - it is written by a blblical scholar, actually the farther back in time you go the _less_ consistent the texts of the new testament are - the exact opposite of what you would expect if they all derived from a common source - this coupled with the fact that stories similar to story of Jesus (except with Egyptian or other mediteranean gods as heros) had been floating around for years before the supposed birth of Christ and finally the lack of any historical Roman records of Christ's existence make even the statment that "Christ was a historical figure" that I hear from even many atheists and agnostic completely untenable - there is no evidence for a historical Christ
Actually maybe you should read "Misquoting Jesus" by B. Ehrman - it is written by a blblical scholar, actually the farther back in time you go the _less_ consistent the texts of the new testament are - the exact opposite of what you would expect if they all derived from a common source - this coupled with the fact that stories similar to story of Jesus (except with Egyptian or other mediteranean gods as heros) had been floating around for years before the supposed birth of Christ and finally the lack of any historical Roman records of Christ's existence make even the statment that "Christ was a historical figure" that I hear from even many atheists and agnostic completely untenable - there is no evidence for a historical Christ
I'm not sure you understand Ehrman very well. Have you read Did Jesus Exist? If you are going to cite Bart Ehrman, a former Christian, a current professor of the New Testament, and the holder of a Masters in Divinity, why not quote the part where he's 100% certain the evidence points to there being a historical Christ. Ehrman has many doubts about Christianity, but one of them isn't whether Jesus was a historical figure.
It's a great article, IMHO. It's short, and definitely worth a read to get past the simplistic analyses of Slashdot posters. ;) ....
===========
That's not, however, because Einstein rejected the notion of God, but because he took the idea of God very seriously, elevating it above a religious conception to a mathematical one. To Einstein, the elegance of the phsyics guiding the universe were God's handiwork, the mark not of a humanlike being that maintains control over the world, but of a divine beauty in nature's laws. As Walter Issacson wrote in his biography, following a religious phase in childhood, Einstein retained "a profound reverence for the harmony and beauty of what he called the mind of God as it was expressed in the creation of the universe and its laws."
The religion of the Bible was too provincial, too small, to contain the God Einstein revered. That God, the one he found in physics and who inspired his science, deserved more. But, nevertheless, Einstein didn't believe that differing views on God should interfere with the development of understanding among men.
God has revealed himself to me as well. Then I realized it was just this hashish joint I got a bit earlier.
Ok, I'll bite anyway. How can you tell it's God reveling himself and not some random hallucination?
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Agreed. He "wants" to be an atheist, and that is fine, free-will in action! And if not for free will, wouldn't we all just be mindless robots carrying out our pre-programmed responses? That gets boring after a time, re: The Dinosaurs. Now, add beings with sentience, free will and a curious mind, now you've got something! A game that's way more interesting to observe. To see all the different types of human interactions. And perhaps God's not into self-promotion, doesn't need to resort to outrageous P.R. stunts, and prefers to stay 'low-key'.
In that case, he wants them to not just believe, but blindly believe like a fool. When I want someone to believe in something, I make sure I have some evidence to show them to make my case.
The whole belief thing doesn't make any sense anyway. What does god get out of people believing in him? Why would this even matter to all powerful being? Punishment for being rational and logical is his 'love'. "You don't believe I exist even though there is really no good reason to believe I exist...here's a world of endless torment for your efforts..."
This is the argument for a hateful, spiteful, self indulging, evil god. A god not worthy of my worship.
That doesn't help anyone, because it just raises the question: How can I know God believes in me? Telling me "just know" isn't enough; if I had the capacity to accept that kind of dogmatic command, I'd probably already believe in gods.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Without evidence one way or another, the only logical conclusion is agnosticism.
Wrong. Contrary to popular opinion, absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
God has revealed himself to me. He'd reveal himself to you if you weren't so afraid he might actually exist.
You won't find what you're not looking for, and you certainly won't find something you're sure doesn't exist.
Sounds startling similar to wish-thinking. What criteria do you use to separate the two?
brandelf -t FreeBSD
Yes, but in science, we don't believe in things pending their refutation. If that's the standard, I suspect you also believe in the giant squid of Pampanelle who has infinite appendages, and rapes you for eternity if you don't sing the sacred song each morning. You haven't proved he doesn't exist, right? You really ought to start singing ...
The universe, and nature are majestic in their own right. Stop cheapening them by implying that they couldn't exist on their own. They do, and that's really freaking awesome.
I'm not affiliated with any religion, I just noticed a large flame war waging, and wish you guys would get over yourselves. There are more important things for which we should utilize our mental resources, centuries old religious debates should be at the bottom of the list.
Just because I disagree with your bashing doesn't mean I'm 'religious people'.
No, there isn't enough knowledge of the untainted writings. We have 11th century copies of Jospehus' works, and 3rd century references. Coincidently, the 3rd century references, by Christian apologists, don't reference the passages that talk about Jesus. It wasn't until the 4th century that they start claiming Josephus as a source for Jesus' historicity.
The primary references for Jesus are the items in the Bible which are, themselves, 2 or 3 times removed.
Jesus is taken as a given because of Christianity.
Since theists can paint god under whatever light it suits them, nothing can be concluded about it, regardless of philosophies or probabilities. Therefore, the question is irrelevant and dismissed as such, until an actual concrete definition of god is brought forth.
Which is why the Ignostic position is the only sensible one.
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