Secondly, @boingboing-de7092ba6df4276921d27a3704c57998:disqus, I honestly thought that the article cited by wysinwyg was accurate and edibly small for a quick read, albeit with it’s own dose of opinion supporting a personal God. It doesn’t misrepresent Einstein, except to make an assumption about his final ideas about human suffering. Am I wrong about this?

No it would not be rational to assume we are rational and then justify that by appealing to rationality. The reason we can say that true statements are objectively true is because they accurately represent an objective reality that exists independent of us. That is what *makes* a statement true.

I regard statements that consider mental illness and brain damage to be inherent moral defects as not particularly enlightened. In fact, I think they are extremely insipid.

You need to pick one, you can’t have both.

Atheism is every bit as dogmatic as evangelical Christianity.  It is based on the logical fallacy that divinity cannot exist because it is impossible to collect evidence of it.

This is quite simply not correct.  If you’re not an atheist you’re probably better off asking atheists what they believe than trying to tell them what they believe.

agnostic:  a = not, gnostic = secret knowledge or insight – generally relating to the divine or the nature of the universe

atheist: a = not; theist: one who believes in one or more gods or forms of divinity.

Atheism is every bit as dogmatic as evangelical Christianity.  It is based on the logical fallacy that divinity cannot exist because it is impossible to collect evidence of it.  This is doubly stupid since even physics and cosmology acknowledge that there are things that are fundamentally unknowable and immeasurable based on our current understanding of space and time still can and do exist ( things beyond our light cone for example ).

If you believe that God is a question to be answered by Philosophers and not scientists, you are agnostic, and only the Reverend Richard Dawkins would try to tell you otherwise.

I didn’t know Einstein wrote the article you cited.  I knew he wrote the letter I cited.  So I hunted the letter down and happened to find it quoted on a crackpot page.  I was linking to the letter, not the commentary. If a letter written by Einstein himself is not a good enough citation then I don’t know how to help you.

Earth to wannabe ‘scientific’ theologians: We’re just large-brained primates that started walking upright and freed two limbs up for dedicated tool fabrication and use. Our knowledge, ideas, language, and formalisms are not in any way, shape, or form historically disconnected statements in a Platonic ur-system of Reason that can be isolated from their own material and temporal context. We were not created in the Universe’s image. Grow up and get over yourselves; science is a collection of apparatuses, methods, and institutions developed to enable effective technical operations to be robust under boundary conditions of absolute indeterminacy and uncertainty, not secure repose upon foundations of Truth.

That, to me, is a much more useful framework for describing belief than yours.

I think the Pyrrho quote is just as much brain damage. As an ideal it just about passes muster, but in fact we are almost incapable of confinsing ourselves to things as they appear. As a more recent philosopher, Thomas Metzinger has said “we are all naive realists”. Getting around this is not impossible, but the only people I know who can do it are people who regularly spend long stretches in samādhi or deep meditative integration – specifically choosing not to react to external stimuli. That builds up an ability to stay with the perception rather than the stories we tell about it under more challenging circumstances like normal perception. I have never observed this under other circumstances, and I’m not aware of any scientific studies of this ability.