Einstein & Faith

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http://www.time.com/time/magazine/artic ... 98,00.html

Nice article on Einstein and religion. It mentions how he had delayed speech (which could be HFA).

Also I like how he said he did not believe in free will His precise religious feeling are someone ambiguous but his parents were not religious. I have already theorised that 25% of atheist are in fact on the spectrum.

He believed God was the sum of the universe.

And that God was revealed though science.

A true classical Deist.

I am always confused by peoples concept of god. Why can't we just accept that we are here as a result of hydrogen atoms being left alone for a few billion years? There is no meaning to life and why should there be? We are ourselves just a complex collection of particles that will come and go as time goes on. From my readings, most enlightened scientists think/thought the same. Einstein never entertained the concept of the traditional 'god' when he stated that 'god does not play dice'.

He thought about the universe in terms of how it would be logical for a creator to construct it. I think he felt that this helped him to think about the subject matter objectively. "God does not play dice" was intended as a rejection of quantum physics. He was a stubborn, hard-headed, arrogant schmuck, and the only reason everyone didn't hate him was that he also happened to be a scientific genius. In fact, a lot of people hated him anyway, and he was widely considered an idiot in some circles. He's classic HFA, and he probably had some other developmental quirks as a bonus.

My grandfather was an engineer for Carolina Power & Light for most of his days, and he fits a similar bill. He had such trouble with speech growing up that his mother made him learn Latin as an attempt to assist him in this area, and he was generally strange altogether. He would hardly speak to me unless I could get him started telling war stories or chatting about some intellectual subject or other, and then he really hated any attempts at give and take conversation. When I got older, he wouldn't talk to me much at all, and he generally felt uncomfortable around me. As he started taking a colder stance toward me, however, he continued having a good relationship with my younger brother in spite of there being a greater intellectual rift between them than with me.

The fellow who programmed the software for the Patriot Missile was HFA as well, which I know through a friend who happens to be dating his ex. The cause for the break-up? The dude insisted upon pushing her buttons incessantly to see how she worked, and it had begun to make her insane. The kid from the previous marriage happens to be HFA as well, and the friend in question once quizzed me a bit on the issue.

Yes, people of scientific genius and engineering skill do have a higher propensity than most for being HFA. This should not necessarily be seen as an encouragement, for these people are really exceptional in a lot of ways. In fact, being extremely intelligent in one area doesn't necessarily mean that they are apt to fully understand other realms of thought. I don't think that Einstein's views on religion should be considered of terribly high importance because this subject is well outside his area of authority. Einstein should be appreciated for what he was, and there I draw the line. He is not the person I would go to if I had a question about religion or spirituality. If I wanted a lecture on General Relativity, I'd talk to him.

I find it unfathomable that people can knowingly subject themselves to beliefs which they know to be implausible, and I know from experience that attempting to do so myself would eventually lead me to insanity. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that I have higher powers of reasoning than others or that I have a less spiritual personality. All it means is that religion conflicts with how I think. Ultimately, I am confident that my views on religion are the right ones, but I acknowledge that my core reason for holding them is that it just happened to rub me the wrong way. Perhaps a religious person would sneer at me angrily and say "it's called faith, you ret*d. Most people understand this concept by the time they're seven years old." Let them.

The same goes for Einstein. If you want, you can read about his reasoning on the subject and see if it works for you. However, being a scientific genius just doesn't give him authority on this subject. In fact, I'm seriously against the concept of holding up scientific geniuses who happened to be atheists for this very reason. For most people, religion is not about logic or empirical reasoning. It's about morality and meaningful existence, and I think that any argumentation against religion should be left up to people more suited to thinking and talking about such areas of thought.

jews sing jew songs??
"la la la la, being a jew... being a jew. la la la la, being a jew... being a jew."

Jewish songs? Ooooooooo!

"We're all miserable, and everyone hates us. If that Messiah guy ever comes, I'm going to give him a bloody nose. The only reason I'm still a Jew is that every other religious group has always treated us like dirt for no reason at all. Our holidays stink. Stay out of our temple. More kugel, please."

Now make it rhyme in Yiddish, and put it to klezmer. That's about the basis of most Jewish thought, and I challenge anyone to refute it. However, I get most of my information from my other (a Jew), and he makes fun of everything.

... ... ... ... ...

How can an eternal being reside in a non-eternal universe? I myself am content with the idea of the "universe is god". I actually have a name for it too. I reference it as Uni. This entity wears a male or female persona depending on how I would like to converse and also is dependent on how I am "feeling". When I pray, I sometimes look up at the stars to the face of "god". I know that I will be heard because all energy is transversal. Thought does effect change in the world around us, this I have not the slightest doubt. When I receive a reply it is usualy in the form of symbological allegory. Some would call this an epiphany. It is one of those moments when things just "click". This conception could also be viewed as a feedback loop. We pose the question and then stimulus from our surroundings usually present the answer. Some psychologist might argue that this is the sub-conscious procession of information, I am not in disagreement. Though I do speculate that our sub-conscious is in fact related to the whole of the universe through quantum effects and harmony. Imagine pulling on a string that seems to be infinitely long. The string would stretch yet there would be a temporal variance the further one followed the string. This is to say that the further one traveled down the string the less noticeable the stretching would be. It is still there though, yet it is happening v e r y s l o w l y........

It's not possible. If 50% of ppl are atheists, and 25% of them are on the spectrum, this would imply that at least 12.5% of general population is on the spectrum, which would be way too many.

Where would this be the case? I know the US is God loving and
all, but I can't imagine a non-communist state where anywhere
near that many people would claim atheism (and in communism
most of the people would be lying).

It was a rhetorical statement designed to make a statement about the general personality type of atheists.

The UK isn't Communist, and they're getting pretty close to the halfway mark if they're not already past it. The same is true of a few other Western European countries, and most people in Northeastern Europe don't believe in any such thing as a god or afterlife in spite of officially being members of the state church (which is a bit of a weird system. A "theocracy," yes, but a toothless one).

Calandale was speaking in terms of a hypothetical scenario, though, in order to take measure of the statistical probability of 25% of atheists being aspies.

I read that 3% of the US population self reports as being atheist.

Polls on WP show about 50% self report as atheist (granted not all from the US).

So if 1/2 the people on the spectum are atheist(in a very non-atheistic country) and there are at most 1.5% on the spectrum (I'm using about twice the 1/150 ratio or say 1.5% on the spectrum to make the math easier). So that is 50% of 1.5% which equals
25% of 3% or the number I guessed at in my posts

There are probably a much larger number of unreported aspies than one thinks, as well.

But, I would suspect that being an atheist in the US causes for a certain social distance which it wouldn't in Western European countries, so the percentage of atheists who are AS, in the US is probably higher.

Einstein's mind was amazing. You just have to ponder relativity for a day to get a glimpse.

I believe there's Something Out There so huge that we can't comprehend it at all. Whatever it is cannot be expressed in scientific terms. I don't know if it's particularly besotted with humans. I know that meditation is healthy. Prayer works, in my experience. That could be quantum physics playing with the observer, I dunno. All in all, it serves me better to allow the existence of ... G-d? I like the dash in the name because it reminds me that we don't know its name at all.