I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation and is but a reflection of human frailty.
Interpretation
Einstein suggests that a deity who rewards and punishes behaves similarly to humans, reflecting our own weaknesses.
In this quote, Albert Einstein expresses skepticism about a traditional understanding of God as one who rewards and punishes humans based on their actions. He implies that such a concept of God mirrors human imperfections and weaknesses, questioning whether a true divine being would operate in such a limited and flawed manner. This perspective encourages a deeper reflection on the nature of divinity and the human condition.
In practice
During a lecture on the nature of faith and ethics.
I cannot then believe in this concept of an anthropomorphic God who has the powers of interfering with these natural laws. As I said before, the most beautiful and most profound religious emotion that we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. And this mysticality is the power of all true science.
If I would follow your advice and Jesus could perceive it, he, as a Jewish teacher, surely would not approve of such behavior.
I want to know all Gods thoughts; all the rest are just details.
In the middle of adversity there is great opportunity.
I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two-thirds of the people of the earth will be killed.
To me the worst thing seems to be a school principally to work with methods of fear, force and artificial authority. Such treatment destroys the sound sentiments, the sincerity and the self-confidence of pupils and produces a subservient subject.
All grandeur, all power, and all subordination to authority rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple and society disappears.
It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living.
The Charter of the United Nations expresses the noblest aspirations of man: abjuration of force in the settlement of disputes between states; the assurance of human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion; the safeguarding of international peace and security.
All too often when liberals cite statistics, they forget the statisticians' warning that correlation is not causation.
The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion because if a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me? There is nothing between.
Without you, without your onslaughts, without your uprootings of us, we should remain all our lives inert, stagnant, puerile, ignorant both of ourselves and of God. You who batter us and then dress our wounds, you who resist us and yield to us, you who wreck and build, you who shackle and liberate, the sap of our souls, the hand of God, the flesh of Christ: it is you, matter, that I bless.
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