Pulling his own strings

Puppet-Einstein illustrates a version of free will: when you form good habits, your choices habitually coincide with your intentions and you're "free."

For instance: I'm a habitual walker. On Saturday afternoon, typically a time of relative immobility for me, I happened upon this article on the importance of moving. So I did. Could I have done otherwise? Pretty sure I could, but the habits of a lifetime converged with the impulse to get up and go. So I went, and I enjoyed my walk. It felt like a free choice to me.

"Shiny, Happy Atheists"

Well written, Messrs. L.*

Why is it that we almost never see the noun “atheist” without some pejorative adjective like “dyspeptic,” which Judith Shulevitz shoehorns into her review of “The Faith Instinct” (Dec. 27)? Are the great majority of atheists really sour and sulky, angry and indignant?

Some unbelievers, uneasy at being the only group known by what it does not believe, have started the Brights, an organization that declares its faith in a natural world, without supernatural intervention. The atheist Einstein professed awe and wonder at this earthly home of ours, and I have not read a word of grump in anything he — or William Butler Yeats, or Matthew Arnold, or a number of other nonbelievers, have said. C’mon, play fair.

*RICHARD LETTIS
Ramsey, N.J.



(Re “Atheists’ Ad Campaign” (letter, Dec. 10), about the American Humanist Association’s ads:) Rather than continuing to remain publicly invisible, the association has recently been fulfilling its mission to raise the visibility and respectability of humanism through ads and other activities. Members of A.H.A. identify themselves in various ways — humanist, agnostic, atheist, freethinker and so on. Our ads reach out to kindred spirits to let them know that they are not alone in their nontheism.

Some people are “embarrassed” by the public acknowledgment that we are humanists. People of good will are not offended simply because others assert differing beliefs. I am not offended by those who say they are good because of God. Similarly, they should not object to others saying they are good without God. As long as we are all good, we can be united in our good works. And this unity is what A.H.A.’s ad campaign can accomplish.

*Mel Lipman
Las Vegas, Dec. 10, 2009
The writer is immediate past president of the American Humanist Association.

(published in the Times)

cosmic religion

Very interesting discussions today, centering on Einstein's 1930 New York Times Magazine essay exploring what he called the "cosmic religious feeling,"

the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research. Only those who realize the immense efforts and, above all, the devotion without which pioneer work in theoretical science cannot be achieved are able to grasp the strength of the emotion out of which alone such work, remote as it is from the immediate realities of life, can issue. What a deep conviction of the rationality of the universe and what a yearning to understand... A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people.

Einstein famously endorsed "Spinoza's God," and a pantheistic universe the uncovering of whose laws is the object of all that rational devotion. That led us to consider the oft-bandied claim that atheists are paradoxically religious in their irreligion. That seems a stretch. But I'm happy to call them "spiritual," a term they may find no more agreeable than "religious"... but read Unweaving the Rainbow. Is that not a devout, inspired book?

A deathbed non-conversion

"I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking...the world is so exquisite, with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better, it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides...Five thousand people prayed for me at an Easter service at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, the largest church in Christendom. A Hindu priest described a large prayer vigil for me held on banks of the Ganges. The Imam of North America told me about his prayers for my recovery. Many Christians and Jews wrote me to tell about theirs. While I do not think that, if there is a god, his plan for me will be altered by prayer, I'm more grateful than I can say to those, including so many whom I've never met, who have pulled for me during my illness. Many of them have asked me how it is possible to face death without the certainty of an afterlife. I can only say that it hasn't been a problem. With reservations about feeble souls, I share the view of a hero of mine, Albert Einstein: I cannot conceive of a god who rewards and punishes his creatures or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I, nor would I want to, conceive of an individual that survives his physical death. Let feeble souls, from fear for absurd egotism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoting striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature." Carl Sagan

Ben Franklin

I've been enjoying Walter Isaacson's biography of Benjamin Franklin. (Einstein is on deck). I didn't know that David Hume had acknowledged Franklin as America's first world-class philosopher, but old Ben -- or Poor Richard -- was a first-rate aphorist for sure. Some of my favorites:

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write something worth reading or do things worth the writing.

Never leave that till tomorrow which you can do today.

Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.

Wish not so much to live long as to live well.

Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight.

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future and crimes from society.

And of course:
Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.