The AFP reports that Albert Einstein, German-born theoretical physicist best known for his theory of relativity and specifically mass–energy equivalence (E = mc2), has described in a letter that the belief in God is “childish.”
Bloomsbury Auctions is selling the letter.
As a Jew himself, Einstein said he had a great affinity with Jewish people but said they “have no different quality for me than all other people”.
“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,” he wrote in the letter written on January 3, 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, cited by The Guardian newspaper.
The man who to turned down an invitation to become Israel’s second president as noted that:
“For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions.” He also added, “As far as my experience goes, they [Jews] 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.”
Many of us understand that the belief in an all-powerful supernatural being is just looney, and religion is the cause of incalculable problems for humanity. It’s nice to know that someone who changed the way we understand the universe can also help others understand and soberly reflect upon what resides solely within ourselves: The notion of God, and the immature minds that seeks it.
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Written on May 13, 2008 | Posted in
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The Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States, painted by Howard Chandler Christy in 1940. It depicts the signing of the U.S. Constitution at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Historian Garry Wills
‘Separation’ was meant as “the great protector of religion, not its enemy.”
Anyone who says our country was founded on religious principles is trying to score political points with conservatives, flat out lying or ignorant of history. Sorry to break it to you.
So while you’re watching the Republican presidential debates keep that thought and this question well in mind: Do you want a president who does not understand the basic tenets of our nation?
Professor emeritus of history at Northwestern University and Pulitzer Prize winning historian Garry Wills was interviewed October 6, 2007 on NPR by Dave Davies of the Philadelphia Daily News, on the history of religion in the founding of the United States and its role in public life.
Wills explains that “some modern evangelicals mistakenly believe the founders of the Republic were guided by biblical teaching, and that American has gradually lost its spiritual moorings. In fact Wills says the founders were not deeply religious and their decision to separate religion from government actually helped America to become a deeply religious society.” But that “hasn’t stopped fervent believers from challenging the concept.”
The following are poignant excerpts from the half-hour long interview (edited). Listen to the full interview here.
Intro:
Our guest historian Garry Wills has been thinking about the role of religion in public life. And he says the influence of evangelicals in the Bush administration is one of several periods in American history when religion has invaded the sphere government. Earlier surges of evangelism he argues, have always provoked a popular reaction which reduced their influence.
Professor Wills began the interview on the separation of church and state in America by describing how he had the opportunity to interview His Holiness the Dalai Lama and asked him the following question:
If you were restored to your country what would you do different?
HH Dalia Lama: “I would disestablish the religion because the American separation between church and state is the proper relationship between politics and religion.”
Tenzin Gyatso, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson
Wills explains that His Holiness the Dalai Lama “wanted to get were we started. Where we had the great luck to start in the 18th century with deist formulators of our government who knew that the best thing for religion was to separate it from the state.
Both [James] Madison and [Thomas] Jefferson said that religion will flourish if it is separated from the state, because in all of the governments that had established religions, religion became contaminated by politics, became corrupted, caused an reaction of anti-clericalism and disgust with the relationship between the two, and that has never happened in America. And no country, no developed country, has a higher degree of religious profession and attendance than the United States. And it’s really I think due to that we did have a separation between church and state.
No other country before ours had dared to launch itself without formal protection from God, by some official religion. Everything else in the constitution…had been around for a long time. And the only thing that was new was that we don’t need an official cult. And a lot of people said ‘of course you do, how can you hope to flourish if God is not blessing you. ‘ Well we launched it and it worked.
Well you know we have a myth in America that we began as a very religious country and we’ve been declining in religiosity ever since, which is the exact opposite of the truth. We were at our lowest level of religiosity in the 1770s when 17% of people were church-goers. And our profession and practice of religion took off like crazy after the Constitution was founded.
The deists founders…rational believers…were the ones that were able to pull off this really astonishing new thing.
He [James Madison] says what Jefferson said, that no one can take away the right of the individual to worship God in whatever way he or she wants. But he spells it out in great detail and he says that the state should have no cognizance of religion. It should not know about it even. It should just keep its hands off.
So much so that later on he said ‘It’s better when we have the census of American citizens…that religious ministers not give their profession because the state has no business knowing that, it has no business knowing anything about religion, it should just keep entirely away from it.
Now that seems very extreme to most people and we have not observed it in our history. He didn’t want, for instance, to have chaplains who wore the uniform of the United States and took salaries from the United States, although they were religious pastors. He didn’t want chaplains in the Congress. He didn’t want tax exemption for churches. We’ve never gone that far in following his principles, but logically we should have. And it’s always been dangerous not to.
There’s nothing wrong with religious feeling but when it starts trying to take over the functions of government then people begin to have some misgivings.
On conservative Senator John Danforth:
He is such a stalwart of the conservatives, you know he brought up suit against Roe V Wade, he supported Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court. He’s a very longstanding, important member of the religious right, and for him to say ‘we’ve gone too far folks, we have to stop this’ is very significant.
Bringing this back to the 2008 presidential race, Republican candidate John McCain recently said, “I just have to say in all candor that since this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles … personally, I prefer someone who I know who has a solid grounding in my faith”
Looking for conservative votes, another Republican basks in ignorance.
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Written on October 7, 2007 | Posted in
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God gauges the candidates
Belief Net has tapped divine inspiration with their new rating system for the 2008 presidential candidates. The ‘God-o-Meter’ rates how often the White House hopefuls discuss God on the campaign trail.
From BeliefNet:
The God-o-Meter (pronounced Gah-DOM-meter) scientifically measures factors such as rate of God-talk, effectiveness—saying God wants a capital gains tax cut doesn’t guarantee a high rating—and other top-secret criteria. Click a candidate’s head to get his or her latest God-o-Meter reading and blog post. And check back often. With so much happening on the campaign trail, God-o-Meter is constantly recalibrating!
Concerning the fairness of the spiritual scale, the ‘Mission’ section of their website states:
Beliefnet does not endorse political candidates or parties. We do accept political advertisements from political campaigns or issue groups and offer equal time to opposing campaigns that also wish to purchase advertising.
We are accustomed to seeing election graphs such as this one:
Now there are even a greater variety of gauges to choose from (including the Garling Gauge!).
The combination of human creativity, an endless desire to categorize, and the improvement and ubiquitousness of computer software have enabled rate-a-candidate-meters to be everywhere these days.
Sen. Chris Dodd’s campaign ‘Talk Clock’ displayed how much speaking time was alloted for each presidential candidate during the debates.
Talk Clock from second Democratic presidential debate
Many websites including MSNBC now allow viewers to rate the candidates during and after the debates.
MSNBC website
Joe Cartoon unleashed a unique polling system in which you ‘blend’ the candidate of your choice.
Joe Cartoon’s ‘Blender Poll’
David Letterman held a political ‘Blink Count’ after the State of the Union address.
[flv]http://garlinggauge.com/videos/blink.flv[/flv]
Late Show with David Letterman
And now the God-o-Meter.
With ‘God’s’ help in meter form, this presidential election cycle has broken many barriers.
We have the first top-tier woman candidate, Sen. Hillary Clinton, the first top-tier black candidate, Sen. Barack Obama, the most money ever raised in a presidential election, and with thousands of serious and silly candidate scales crammed into every corner of the internet, it now seems like the most ‘rated’ presidential election yet.
What will we do with all this random information on the prospective candidates?
Who knows, but hopefully the electorate will be able to discern some useful information from all the fluff and choose our next leader wisely.
After you’ve analyzed the blending, blinking, God-count, and hollow panegyrics on shared values, check the candidates’ websites to see how they stack up on the issues, visit the ‘head to head’ video debate, and the Yahoo’s candidate mashup for starters.
All we need now is a dunk tank.
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Mitt Romney & Jan Mickelson
ON AIR & OFF AIR
Romney tells radio host he is tired of talking about Mormonism
Religion weighs heavy on the Romney campaign.
John Martin of the Poltico blogged this video of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney defending his religious consistencies on and off the air.
First posted on the studio website, Romney and his campaign staff were unaware the presidential hopeful had been videotaped by a studio camera. Romney appears agitated toward the end, stating:
I don’t like coming on the air and having you going after my church and me and my…I’m not running as a Mormon, and I get a little tired of coming on a show like yours and having it all about Mormon…
You’re trying to tell me that I’m not a faithful Mormon…
And you know what, I’m not running to talk about Mormonism.
Whether he likes it or not, the public views Mitt Romney through Mormon-colored glasses.
Written on August 4, 2007 | Posted in
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Doug Giles is the center of his own universe
Giles asserts Christianity is the center of atheist morality
In the May 26th, 2007 article by Doug Giles, Hey Atheists … Get Your Own Moral Code, Giles argues that atheists can not have a strong moral code in which God and the Bible are irrelevant, and yet follow moral and ethical codes “similar to the principles inherent to the Judeo-Christian traditions”.
The question is, why not?
Since Gaylord Parkinson/Ronald Reagan safely coined the eleventh commandment (they can have it), Giles must have proclaimed the twelfth: Do Not Mimic Me!
In Giles own words:
“The problem I have, however, with the atheists and their goodness and their morality claims is that all your ethical codes of conduct sound strangely similar to the principles inherent to the Judeo-Christian traditions.”
Why is that a problem?
You would think that Christians would be pleased to have atheists follow moral and ethical codes similar to Judeo-Christian principles, even if they do not subscribe to a religious doctrine.
The evolutionary river of moral responsibility has many tributaries, Judeo-Christian traditions amongst them. Obviously the Bible has some good ideas in it, how else could it have endured so long as such a powerful force. But arguing that atheists cannot adhere to a moral and ethical codes similar to those in the Bible is self-righteous Christian egomania.
You can live a life with high moral and ethical standards without ever hearing of a book called the Bible. Judeo-Christian traditions are part of human heritage, and atheists living a life of high standards are going to use the most fruitful ideas humanity has to offer, while rejecting what they view as the rotten ones, such as religion.
Giles explains how atheists should act:
“If I were an atheist and I believed that God didn’t exist, that the Bible was a bunch of weird bunk written by religiously deluded men several thousand years ago, that Jesus was an apocalyptic, sandal-wearing, hippie forerunner of David Koresh who went around spitting out cheeky clichés who needed not to be heeded, but straight-jacketed or at least ignored—I sure as heck wouldn’t be borrowing any tidbits of His wisdom to navigate my life’s glide path.”
Giles is mistaken in his belief that atheists have hand-picked parts of ‘God’s wisdom’. Atheists believe morality and ethical responsibility are human traditions, human principles.
Mr. Giles’ statements expose the root problem of many unnecessary tragic human conflicts around the globe and throughout human history, all stemming from religious perspectives.
Would the Crusades have occurred without the impetus or excuse of religion? Would the women of Salem have been viewed as witches without God in the mix? If the Middle East was secular, would there be as much conflict and tit for tat murder?
Many religions assert that their way is the correct one, and all others will suffer if they do not convert. Many faithful feel it is their duty to convince other people that they should believe in the mythology they do.
While Mr. Giles has the right to speak his mind, it is difficult to respect those who feel you are wrong (or simply going to burn in eternal damnation) if you do not share their beliefs. It is doubly difficult to respect those whose religious beliefs promote the indoctrination of others. Just the other day Mormon missionaries knocked repeatedly upon my door. What arrogance.
While Giles is not attempting to indoctrinate anyone with his article, he is claiming morality as if Christians invented it.
He asks to atheists the following questions and offers suggestions:
“Are you going to continue to blather on about there being no God and then live like there is one and that His word and will matters? Get consistent, why don’t ‘cha? Don’t live by the Ten Commandments. Don’t live by the Golden Rule. Don’t do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That’s our stuff. That’s the Judeo-Christian way.”
That’s our stuff?
I’m afraid Mr. Giles is mistaken again. Some of the Ten Commandments are simply common sense rules to live together in an honorable society, such as Thou shalt not murder. Um, duh. The “Golden Rule” has also been around a lot longer than Christianity and is packaged in many forms. I’m sure you’ve seen the poster:
Poster
By subscribing to religious doctrine the faithful are donning their belief-blinders, shunning the ideas of other religions, secularists, and philosophers, and unable to see the cornucopia of ways others choose to live a moral and ethical life.
Just as many once believed the Earth was the center of the universe, Mr. Giles demonstrates what many faithful still believe, that their religion is the center of the universe, and what is similar to it must be based upon it.
Doug Giles fails to recognize that morality and high ethical standards are principles created by people, not the divine. By following high moral and ethical standards, atheists demonstrate that you do not need religion or the belief in a supernatural being to live a life of virtue.
I’m sorry Mr. Giles, but faith and morality are separate issues.
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Written on May 27, 2007 | Posted in
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