richarddawkins.net

Richard Dawkins:

Religious apologists cannot entirely be blamed for claiming Albert Einstein as one of their own. He was fond of quoting “God” as a poetic metaphor, in rather irresponsible fashion although, to be fair in turn to Einstein, he couldn’t have anticipated the extent of today’s dishonest quote-mining. So it is good to see this letter, written shortly before his death, which should lay to rest, once and for all, the eager myth that Einstein believed in God. Along with various other sources, this letter finally confirms that Einstein was, in every realistic sense of the word, an atheist. When the letter came up for auction in London, in 2008, I made a futile attempt to buy it as a gift for the Richard Dawkins Foundation. I could offer only a small fraction of the eventual price, and even that was far less than the $3M now being asked as a minimum. I hope that whoever wins this auction will display it prominently, complete with translations into English and other languages.

From Einstein’s letter:

The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also 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.

In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality otherwise accepted, as a Jew the privilege of monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza recognized with all incision, probably as the first one. And the animistic interpretations of the religions of nature are in principle not annulled by monopolization. With such walls we can only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are not furthered by them. On the contrary.