On 22 March 1954, Einstein received a letter from Joseph Dispentiere, an Italian immigrant who had worked as an experimental machinist in New Jersey. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions." In 2018 his letter to Gutkind was sold for $2.9 million. On January 3, 1954, Einstein sent the following reply to Gutkind: "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. Brouwer, Einstein read the philosopher Eric Gutkind's book Choose Life, a discussion of the relationship between Jewish revelation and the modern world. In a 1947 letter he stated that "It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously." In a letter to Beatrice Frohlich on 17 December 1952, Einstein stated, "The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naïve." Personal God Įinstein expressed his skepticism regarding the existence of an anthropomorphic god, such as the God of Abrahamic religions, often describing this view as "naïve" and "childlike". The road to this paradise was not as comfortable and alluring as the road to the religious paradise but it has shown itself reliable, and I have never regretted having chosen it. Similarly motivated men of the present and of the past, as well as the insights they had achieved, were the friends who could not be lost. The mental grasp of this extra-personal world within the frame of our capabilities presented itself to my mind, half consciously, half unconsciously, as a supreme goal. The contemplation of this world beckoned as a liberation, and I soon noticed that many a man whom I had learned to esteem and to admire had found inner freedom and security in its pursuit. Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking. #A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION WILLIAM R. HALSTEAD FREE#It is quite clear to me that the religious paradise of youth, which was thus lost, was a first attempt to free myself from the chains of the 'merely personal,' from an existence dominated by wishes, hopes, and primitive feelings. Mistrust of every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude toward the convictions that were alive in any specific social environment-an attitude that has never again left me, even though, later on, it has been tempered by a better insight into the causal connections. 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. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. 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. In his Autobiographical Notes, Einstein wrote that he had gradually lost his faith early in childhood: Early childhood Įinstein was raised by secular Jewish parents and attended a local Catholic public elementary school in Munich. He conceded that "the problem involved is too vast for our limited minds". Einstein believed the problem of God was the "most difficult in the world"-a question that could not be answered "simply with yes or no".
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