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ARTICLES & COMMENTARY: TOC: The Rise of Church-State Alliances: Imperial Edicts & Church Councils: 306-565 The Constitution, the Bible, and the Commandments The Classical Temple Architecture of Washington, DC Ulrich Zwingli and the Protestant Alliance of Church and State The Bible and the Quran: A Scriptural Comparison Religious Right vs Interracial Marriages Social Conservatism as a Tool of the State The Changing Religious Identification of the USA Moral Hypocrisy in the Bible Belt: CDC & FBI stats Ring Species, Evolution and why Intelligent Design isn't science Who am I and Why this project? MYTH BUSTERS & EYE OPENERS FROM OTHERS: Church and State: Court Holdings Historical Revisionism: On David Barton's Christian Nation Biblical Archeology Review Special: The Captivity, Exodus, and Conquest Like most scientists, Albert Einstein did not believe in a personal God. At one time in his life there was propaganda saying otherwise. Addressing it, he maintained, "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". This is a God with nopersonality or consciousness. His religion deals with the admiration of the STRUCTURE of the universe. God is not the personhood of a diety such as Allah or YHWH who are more than anything Gods created in the image of the despotic men. Life was extremely hard then and so were the rules for survival, both physically and socially. "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings." That is another statement that denies a deity with a individual personhood but can go no farther than to. Spinoza was a Pantheist. Pantheism is where the Universe IS God and God IS the Universe. His "god" is one that is revealed in the orderly harmony of the universe. Again we are seeing his focus on STRUCTURE: order and harmony. Natural, physical laws and forces. And since to Einstein there is no personal God, what is revealed can only be described the laws of nature. God is thus a metaphor for the laws of nature. It is interesting to note that Stephen Hawking's Inflation based, No-Boundaries Universe model claims that the universe had no creation event. Andrei Linde's Eternal Inflationary model also has universe that has always existed. Einstein noted regarding traditional religions: "an attempt to find an out where there is no door." This was his claim concerning dogmatic religion that worships a personal god and believes in an afterlife. To support this: "I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty." Here, he makes the claim that we have created a god who is modeled after our own purposes; a diety that is but a reflection of its creators with not only their moral good but all of their weakness. This God has been created in the image of man; it has capacity for great love and great harm; it commits both good and evil. But like the book of human history - the Jewish Old Testament, the Christian New Testament and the Muslim Quran contain far more pharisaical wrath and threats than they dolove and mercy. "Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms." "True religion is real living; living with all one's soul, with all one's goodness and righteousness." This is the true religion of people in love with life who do not have the weight and irrationality of ancient or medieval superstitions on their backs. If Einstein says we should mix religion with science its his definition of religion he is speaking of; not one of a personal God which he denies. His religion of living ones life with all one's soul is devoid of any anthropomorphic theism. And there is this beautiful statement: "The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. The religion which based on experience, which refuses dogmatic. If there's any religion that would cope the scientific needs it will be Buddhism...." Dogmatic religion is any revelatory religion that claims that a concrete set of absolutes has been revealed to prophets or brought to us by saviors. The entire Bible and Koran are exercises in dogmatic religions with frail personal Gods created in the image of ruling men in antiquity. Lets see what he says about righteousness and morality: "A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death." Here again, we see a criticism of those that see morality as connected to a god through the fear of punishment or hope for reward. Here is a little more. "Morality is of the highest importance-- but for us, not for God." In Christianity we hear all kinds of talk about how God is so primarily concerned with morality. According to Einstein, that is so because Judeo-Christianity, Islam, etc, have a personal god that has been created out of: "I believe in Spinoza's God" Spinoza's Pantheism stated that God is the Universe and the Universe is God . Like Spinoza, Einstein's God was not one with any mind or a 'being' separate from nature itself. The emergence of Deism during the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods reveal an interesting convergence of Pantheism and Newton's Mechanical Universe and a God who speaks through nature and reason. To deists, lik Einstein, religious revelation is bunk. It was a natural religion without the superstitions of divine revelation that are found in Middle-Eastern religions. Deists rejected corruptions of Christianity such as the Bible as God's Word, the immaculate conception, original sin and atonement, miracles and creation by Jesus, the trinity, the resurrection and the ascension. "not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings." All of these statements deny the existence of any God's will, any Gods' plan, God's aversion to sin, or God's plans for judging us on our actions, etc. One needs conciousness and volition; a personality to PLAN or have a WILL. Einstein denied the existence of a personal God, so to him there can be no will of God, plan of God nor any divine concern for our moral actions as far as Einstein was concerned. Einstein's belief are totally contrary to the Christian Dogma of what god is. This "god" of his is not concerned with our actions because it has no intellect or personality. Spinoza's Godis a symbolic metaphor. Einstein was slippery like a politician in this sense because most people don't really know what Spinoza believed. Pantheism was a heresy punishable by death) Let"s mix it up again: "Since our inner experiences consist of reproductions, and combinations of sensory impressions, the concept of a soul without a body seem to me to be empty and devoid of meaning." "Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms." "Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts." So what is true religion to Einstein? "True religion is real living; living with all one's soul, with all one's goodness and righteousness." "I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature." Some have claimed Einstein became a Christian on his death bed but like the same conversion tales regarding Thomas Paine and Charles Darwin, it is a bogus story with no factual support. No primary sources support any of these claims. In fact,according to Einstein's son, when he was on his deathbed his mind was still working on physical cosmological problems and told his son: "If only I had more math". "Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the action of people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly be inclined to believe that events could be influenced by a prayer, i.e. by a wish addressed to a Supernatural Being. (Albert Einstein, 1936) Responding to a child who wrote and asked if scientists pray." Source: Albert Einstein: The Human Side, Edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffmann "For science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary. Religion, on the other hand, deals only with evaluations of human thought and action: it cannot justifiably speak of facts and relationships between facts. According to this interpretation the well-known conflicts between religion and science in the past must all be ascribed to a misapprehension of the situation which has been described. For example, a conflict arises when a religious community insists on the absolute truthfulness of all statements recorded in the Bible. This means an intervention on the part of religion into the sphere of science; this is where the struggle of the Church against doctrines of Galileo and Darwin belongs. On the other hand, representatives of science have often made an attempt to arrive at fundamental judgments with respect to values and ends on the basis of scientific method, and in this way have set themselves in opposition to religion. These conflicts have all sprung from fatal errors." (1941) "By way of the understanding he achieves a far-reaching emancipation from the shackles of personal hopes and desires, and thereby attains that humble attitude of mind toward the grandeur of reason incarnate in existence, and which, in its profoundest depths, is inaccessible to man. This attitude, however, appears to me to be religious, in the highest sense of the word. And so it seems to me that science not only purifies the religious impulse of the dross of its anthropomorphism but also contributes to a religious spiritualization of our understanding of life. The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge." (1941) "Religion is concerned with man's attitude towards nature at large, with the establishing of ideals for the individual and communal life, and with human mutual relationship. These ideals religion attempts to attain by exerting an educational influence on tradition and through the development and promulgation of certain easily accessible thoughts and narratives (epics and myths) which are apt to influence evaluation and action along the lines of accepted ideals. It is this mythical, or rather symbolic, content of the religious traditions which is likely to come into conflict with science. This occurs whenever this religious stock of ideas contains dogmatically fixed statements on subjects which belong in the domain of science." (1948)
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