| Letter to Eric
Gutkind (partial) Albert
Einstein (1954) Translated
from
the German by Joan Stambaugh ...
... 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. 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 priviliege 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 monopolisation. With such walls we can
only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are not
furthered by them. On the contrary. Now that I have
quite openly stated our differences in intellectual convictions it is
still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential
things, ie in our evalutations of human behaviour. What separates us
are only intellectual 'props' and `rationalisation' in Freud's
language. Therefore I think that we would understand each other quite
well if we talked about concrete things. With
friendly thanks and best wishes Yours, A.
Einstein.
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