The Religiousness of Science

You will hardly find one among the profounder sort of scientific minds without a peculiar religious feeling of his own. But it is different from the religion of the naive man. For the latter God is a being from whose care one hopes to benefit and whose punishment one fears; a sublimation of a feeling similar to that of a child for its father, a being to whom one stands to some extent in a personal relation, however deeply it may be tinged with awe.

But the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. The future, to him, is every whit as necessary and determined as the past. There is nothing divine about morality, it is a purely human affair. His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages.


The Plight of Science

The German-speaking countries are menaced by a danger to which those in
the know are in duty bound to call attention in the most emphatic terms. The
economic stress which political events bring in their train does not hit
everybody equally hard. Among the hardest hit are the institutions and
individuals whose material existence depends directly on the State. To this
category belong the scientific institutions and workers on whose work not
merely the well-being of science but also the position occupied by Germany
and Austria in the scale of culture very largely depends.
To grasp the full gravity of the situation it is necessary to bear in mind the
following consideration. In times of crisis people are generally blind to
everything outside their immediate necessities. For work which is directly
productive of material wealth they will pay. But science, if it is to flourish, must
have no practical end in view. As a general rule, the knowledge and the
methods which it creates only subserve practical ends indirectly and, in many
cases, not till after the lapse of several generations. Neglect of science leads
to a subsequent dearth of intellectual workers able, in virtue of their
independent outlook and judgment, to blaze new trails for industry or adapt
themselves to new situations. Where scientific enquiry is stunted the
intellectual life of the nation dries up, which means the withering of many
possibilities of future development. This is what we have to prevent. Now that
the State has been weakened as a result of nonpolitical causes, it is up to the
economically stronger members of the community to come to the rescue
directly, and prevent the decay of scientific life.

Far-sighted men with a clear understanding of the situation have set up
institutions by which scientific work of every sort is to be kept going in
Germany and Austria. Help to make these efforts a real success. In my
teaching work I see with admiration that economic troubles have not yet
succeeded in stifling the will and the enthusiasm for scientific research. Far
from it! Indeed, it looks as if our disasters had actually quickened the
devotion to non-material goods. Everywhere people are working with burning
enthusiasm in the most difficult circumstances. See to it that the will-power
and the talents of the youth of to-day do not perish to the grievous hurt of the
community as a whole.

Religion and Science

Everything that the human race has done and thought is concerned with the
satisfaction of felt needs and the assuagement of pain. One has to keep this
constantly in mind if one wishes to understand spiritual movements and their
development. Feeling and desire are the motive forces behind all human
endeavour and human creation, in however exalted a guise the latter may
present itself to us.

Now what are the feelings and needs that have led men to
religious thought and belief in the widest sense of the words? A little
consideration will suffice to show us that the most varying emotions preside
over the birth of religious thought and experience. With primitive man it is
above all fear that evokes religious notions--fear of hunger, wild beasts,
sickness, death. Since at this stage of existence understanding of causal
connexions is usually poorly developed, the human mind creates for itself
more or less analogous beings on whose wills and actions these fearful
happenings depend. One's object now is to secure the favour of these beings
by carrying out actions and offering sacrifices which, according to the tradition
handed down from generation to generation, propitiate them or make them
well disposed towards a mortal. I am speaking now of the religion of fear.
This, though not created, is in an important degree stabilized by the formation
of a special priestly caste which sets up as a mediator between the people and
the beings they fear, and erects a hegemony on this basis. In many cases the
leader or ruler whose position depends on other factors, or a privileged class,
combines priestly functions with its secular authority in order to make the
latter more secure; or the political rulers and the priestly caste make common
cause in their own interests.

The social feelings are another source of the crystallization of religion. Fathers
and mothers and the leaders of larger human communities are mortal and
fallible. The desire for guidance, love, and support prompts men to form the
social or moral conception of God. This is the God of Providence who
protects, disposes, rewards, and punishes, the God who, according to the
width of the believer's outlook, loves and cherishes the life of the tribe or of
the human race, or even life as such, the comforter in sorrow and unsatisfied
longing, who preserves the souls of the dead. This is the social or moral
conception of God.

The Jewish scriptures admirably illustrate the development from the religion of
fear to moral religion, which is continued in the New Testament. The religions
of all civilized peoples, especially the peoples of the Orient, are primarily
moral religions. The development from a religion of fear to moral religion is a
great step in a nation's life. That primitive religions are based entirely on fear
and the religions of civilized peoples purely on morality is a prejudice against
which we must be on our guard. The truth is that they are all intermediate
types, with this reservation, that on the higher levels of social life the religion of
morality predominates.

Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their
conception of God. Only individuals of exceptional endowments and
exceptionally high-minded communities, as a general rule, get in any real sense
beyond this level. But there is a third state of religious experience which
belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form, and which
I will call cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to explain this feeling to
anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic
conception of God corresponding to it.

The individual feels the nothingness of human desires and aims and the
sublimity and marvellous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in
the world of thought. He looks upon individual existence as a sort of prison
and wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole. The
beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear in earlier stages of
development--e.g., in many of the Psalms of David and in some of the
Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learnt from the wonderful writings of
Schopenhauer especially, contains a much stronger element of it.
The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of
religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's
image; so that there can be no Church whose central teachings are based on
it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who
were filled with the highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases
regarded by their contemporaries as Atheists, sometimes also as saints.
Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza
are closely akin to one another.

How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to
another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In
my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this
feeling and keep it alive in those who are capable of it.

We thus arrive at a conception of the relation of science to religion very
different from the usual one. When one views the matter historically one is
inclined to look upon science and religion as irreconcilable antagonists, and
for a very obvious reason. The man who is thoroughly convinced of the
universal operation of the law of causation cannot for a moment entertain the
idea of a being who interferes in the course of events--that is, if he takes the
hypothesis of causality really seriously. He has no use for the religion of fear
and equally little for social or moral religion. A God who rewards and
punishes is inconceivable to him for the simple reason that a man's actions are
determined by necessity, external and internal, so that in God's eyes he cannot
be responsible, any more than an inanimate object is responsible for the
motions it goes through. Hence science has been charged with undermining
morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behaviour should be based
effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is
necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by
fear and punishment and hope of reward after death.

It is therefore easy to see why the Churches have always fought science and
persecuted its devotees. On the other hand, I maintain that cosmic religious
feeling is the strongest and noblest incitement to scientific research. Only those
who realize the immense efforts and, above all, the devotion which pioneer
work in theoretical science demands, can 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, were it but a feeble reflection of the mind
revealed in this world, Kepler and Newton must have had to enable them to
spend years of solitary labour in disentangling the principles of celestial
mechanics! Those whose acquaintance with scientific research is derived
chiefly from its practical results easily develop a completely false notion of the
mentality of the men who, surrounded by a sceptical world, have shown the
way to those like-minded with themselves, scattered through the earth and the
centuries. Only one who has devoted his life to similar ends can have a vivid
realization of what has inspired these men and given them the strength to
remain true to their purpose in spite of countless failures. It is cosmic religious
feeling that gives a man strength of this sort. A contemporary has said, not
unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are
the only profoundly religious people.

Albert Einstein's Views on LIfe,World & Wealth

The Meaning of Life

What is the meaning of human life, or of organic life altogether? To answer
this question at all implies a religion. Is there any sense then, you ask, in
putting it? I answer, the man who regards his own life and that of his
fellow-creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost
disqualified for life.

The World as I see it

What an extraordinary situation is that of us mortals! Each of us is here for a
brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he
feels it. But from the point of view of daily life, without going deeper, we exist for our fellow-men--in the first place for those on whose smiles and welfare all our happiness depends, and next for all those unknown to us personally with
whose destinies we are bound up by the tie of sympathy. A hundred times
every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labours
of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in
the same measure as I have received and am still receiving. I am strongly
drawn to the simple life and am often oppressed by the feeling that I am
engrossing an unnecessary amount of the labour of my fellow-men. I regard
class differences as contrary to justice and, in the last resort, based on force. I
also consider that plain living is good for everybody, physically and mentally.
In human freedom in the philosophical sense I am definitely a disbeliever.
Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance
with inner necessity. Schopenhauer's saying, that "a man can do as he will, but
not will as he will," has been an inspiration to me since my youth up, and a
continual consolation and unfailing well-spring of patience in the face of the
hardships of life, my own and others'. This feeling mercifully mitigates the
sense of responsibility which so easily becomes paralysing, and it prevents us
from taking ourselves and other people too seriously; it conduces to a view of
life in which humour, above all, has its due place.

To inquire after the meaning or object of one's own existence or of creation
generally has always seemed to me absurd from an objective point of view.
And yet everybody has certain ideals which determine the direction of his
endeavours and his judgments. In this sense I have never looked upon ease
and happiness as ends in themselves--such an ethical basis I call more proper
for a herd of swine. The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time
after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth,
Goodness, and Beauty. Without the sense of fellowship with men of like mind,
of preoccupation with the objective, the eternally unattainable in the field of art
and scientific research, life would have seemed to me empty. The ordinary
objects of human endeavour--property, outward success, luxury--have
always seemed to me contemptible.

My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always
contrasted oddly with my pronounced freedom from the need for direct
contact with other human beings and human communities. I gang my own gait
and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my
immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties I have never
lost an obstinate sense of detachment, of the need for solitude--a feeling
which increases with the years. One is sharply conscious, yet without regret,
of the limits to the possibility of mutual understanding and sympathy with one's
fellow-creatures. Such a person no doubt loses something in the way of
geniality and light-heartedness ; on the other hand, he is largely independent of
the opinions, habits, and judgments of his fellows and avoids the temptation to
take his stand on such insecure foundations.

My political ideal is that of democracy. Let every man be respected as an
individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the
recipient of excessive admiration and respect from my fellows through no
fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire,
unattainable for many, to understand the one or two ideas to which I have
with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware
that it is necessary for the success of any complex undertaking that one man
should do the thinking and directing and in general bear the responsibility. But
the led must not be compelled, they must be able to choose their leader. An
autocratic system of coercion, in my opinion, soon degenerates. For force
always attracts men of low morality, and I believe it to be an invariable rule
that tyrants of genius are succeeded by scoundrels. For this reason I have
always been passionately opposed to systems such as we see in Italy and
Russia to-day. The thing that has brought discredit upon the prevailing form of
democracy in Europe to-day is not to be laid to the door of the democratic
idea as such, but to lack of stability on the part of the heads of governments
and to the impersonal character of the electoral system. I believe that in this
respect the United States of America have found the right way. They have a
responsible President who is elected for a sufficiently long period and has
sufficient powers to be really responsible. On the other hand, what I value in
our political system is the more extensive provision that it makes for the
individual in case of illness or need. The really valuable thing in the pageant of
human life seems to me not the State but the creative, sentient individual, the
personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such
remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.

This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of the herd nature, the military
system, which I abhor. That a man can take pleasure in marching in formation
to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been
given his big brain by mistake; a backbone was all he needed. This
plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed.
Heroism by order, senseless violence, and all the pestilent nonsense that does
by the name of patriotism--how I hate them! War seems to me a mean,
contemptible thing: I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in such
an abominable business. And yet so high, in spite of everything, is my opinion
of the human race that I believe this bogey would have disappeared long ago,
had the sound sense of the nations not been systematically corrupted by
commercial and political interests acting through the schools and the Press.
The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental
emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who
knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good
as dead, a snuffed-out candle. It was the experience of mystery--even if
mixed with fear--that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of
something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest
reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in
their most elementary forms--it is this knowledge and this emotion that
constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a
deeply religious man. I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes
his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves.
An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my
comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or
absurd egoism of feeble souls. Enough for me the mystery of the eternity of
life, and the inkling of the marvellous structure of reality, together with the
single-hearted endeavour to comprehend a portion, be it never so tiny, of the
reason that manifests itself in nature.

Good and Evil

It is right in principle that those should be the best loved who have contributed
most to the elevation of the human race and human life. But, if one goes on to
ask who they are, one finds oneself in no inconsiderable difficulties. In the
case of political, and even of religious, leaders, it is often very doubtful
whether they have done more good or harm. Hence I most seriously believe
that one does people the best service by giving them some elevating work to
do and thus indirectly elevating them. This applies most of all to the great
artist, but also in a lesser degree to the scientist. To be sure, it is not the fruits
of scientific research that elevate a man and enrich his nature, but the urge to
understand, the intellectual work, creative or receptive. It would surely be
absurd to judge the value of the Talmud, for instance, by its intellectual fruits.
The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure
and the sense in which he has attained to liberation from the self.

Of Wealth

I am absolutely convinced that no wealth in the world can help humanity
forward, even in the hands of the most devoted worker in this cause. The
example of great and pure characters is the only thing that can produce fine
ideas and noble deeds. Money only appeals to selfishness and always tempts
its owners irresistibly to abuse it.

Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus, or Gandhi armed with the money-bags of
Carnegie?

A Journey Called "Life"

A Journey Called "Life"

Life! We all have heard about this 4 letter's it.(But may be,never thought about it thoroughly!)

Can anyone tell me what does it really mean ?"A journey between birth & death","a dream","a voyage" or "a visit of earth just for the sake of nothing"!

Different people,different meanings! Yeah,that's right.But do you really want "your life" just to be a "dream","a journey","a visit"? Nothing more than that?! In Hinduism it is said that you are given a chance called "life" just to correct your past deeds because of whom you are on earth.

Nice definition for life!Many had read it in the past,many are reading at present & many will read in future,but who is going to understand it? We all people,read very well,listen very well,think very well,but implement very little!And that's the most crucial thing about life that we don't understand it until the end!And when we understand life,we don't have to do it!That's pretty weird! We all run after time throughout our life but finally it runs over us!

After all what do we want from life? Money,love,peace or we aren't clear even about our goal in life?

I know,every human has a purpose in life.But does everyone acquire it at the end? Or it is something like that you have climbed the Everest but now you wonder that it wasn't the same thing which you wanted! That happens in most cases.Someone has rightly said,"Sucess is a journey,not a destination!". Because once you got what you wanted you have nothing else to achieve! And this happens just because our dreams are always self-centred or family-centred! We never try to come out of our "family-nest"!Here I don't want to say that don't love your famiy members.Love them with the purity of your heart,but at the same time,don't forget about that orphan who has none in this world to take care or that old & lonely mother crying for her child or that father who don't have money to feed his family or a youth going to commit suicide just because she/he doesn't have that job to complete her/his parent's dreams.

I finally urge you to make your life a fruitful one not only for you & your family but someone other than! Because every moment you going near to your "death" & every second of your life is uncertain!

INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES

(1) Use the talents you have. The woods would be silent if no birds sang there except those that who sang best.

- Henry Van Dyke

(2) He, who wants a rose, must respect thorn.

- Anonymous

(3) The best way to cheer yourself up, is to try to cheer somebody else up.

- Mark Twain

(4) To bring up a child in the way he should go, travel that way yourself, once in a while.

- Josh Billings

(5) I count him braver who overcomes his desires than one who conquers his enemies, for the hardest victory is over self.

- Aristotle

(6) When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long & so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the door which has opened for us.

- Alexander Graham Bell

(7) The wise man in the storm prays God, not for safety from danger but for deliverance from fear.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

(8) Gratitude is the fairest blossom which springs from the soul.

- Henry Ward Beecher

(9) Before anything else, getting ready is the secret of success.

- Henry Ford

(10) If you surrender completely to the moments as they pass, you live more richly those moments.

- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

(11) If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than the unhappiness of others, we would have paradise in a few years.

- Bertrand Russell

(12) The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter her/his life by altering her/his attitudes.

- William James