E-bay selling Einstin´s "God letter" written 1 year before his death Read English tra

Billy T · Oct 8, 2012

http://www.relativitybook.com/resources/Einstein_religion.html said:

".. Letter to Eric Gutkind (partial) from 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."
Click to expand...

Opening bid is three million dollars, but translater´s "partial" and some comments in current press seem to indicate that new text, still in German, may come out. The envelope is being sold with the letter. It has a 3 cent stamp on it. I don´t know US postage, but if first class stamp now costs 36.45 cents, then the 3 cent stamp Einstein sent his "God letter" with 58 years ago implies 4.4% annual inflation. [3x(1.044^58)] = 3x12.15)

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tashja · Oct 9, 2012

I love reading Einstein's letters before going to sleep. He was probably angry with God do to the hypocrisy of religious leaders around him.

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