“I’m not an atheist. I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds”
-Albert Einstein
I will only believe a person is atheist if he or she is smarter than Albert Einstein.
First of all: Einstein was an Agnostic Deist.
Second: The above post isn’t claiming Einstein was an Atheist, just that he did more for the world than Jesus. Even Einstein thought this was possible.
“It is quite possible that we can do greater things than Jesus, for what is written in the Bible about him is poetically embellished.”
Though he was raised in a Jewish family, his Agnosticism was an early development in his life.
“As the first way out there was religion, which is implanted into every child by way of the traditional education-machine. Thus I came — though the child of entirely irreligious (Jewish) parents — to a deep religiousness, which, however, reached an abrupt end at the age of twelve. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression.”
Instead, most of his life he believed in something “near” Spinoza’s God.
“My views are near those of Spinoza: admiration for the beauty of and belief in the logical simplicity of the order which we can grasp humbly and only imperfectly.”
But recruiting him for belief in your silly personal God actually pissed him off.
“It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”
Few Atheists will disagree with him there. I certainly don’t.
“The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naïve.”
Agreed.
“I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.”
Agreed.
“I am convinced that some political and social activities and practices of the Catholic organizations are detrimental and even dangerous for the community as a whole, here and everywhere. I mention here only the fight against birth control at a time when overpopulation in various countries has become a serious threat to the health of people and a grave obstacle to any attempt to organize peace on this planet.”
Totally agree with him there.(All quotes courtesy of this website.)So please, stop pretending Einstein’s Agnostic belief in a Deistic God who resembles the laws of the universe in any way supports your silly personal gods who say “how high?” when you pray for them to jump.
