On Tuesday Michael posted about Einstein’s apparent atheism. The letter in which Einstein wrote “The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish” is up for auction this week, and is expected to garner upwards of $12,00 at Bloomsbury Auctions in London.

Who Cares?: He never claimed to be a mystic Einstein was notoriously ambivalent about his spiritual convictions, so I’m not sure the letter proves anything other than what he was thinking at the exact moment he wrote it. But it certainly makes me wonder about Einstein’s feasibility as a religious role model for anyone. The man was a patent clerk turned nuclear physicist. Though charming and unquestionably brilliant, he was not a theologian, and never purported to be one. He may have thought seriously about matters of God and religion, but I’ve never read anything that suggests he spent significant time studying the Bible or any other Jewish texts (most biographies cite a brief religious phase lasting for a year or two before he turned 13). He knew physics, and though he thought about God, Judaism and Torah on his own, he had no serious training or background in the subject matter.

Would you go to your rabbi for financial advice? Would you ask a cantor to design you a car? Is the woman who fills your cavities the best person to go to when you need help filing your taxes? Of course not.

One doesn’t need to go to rabbinical school to have a well-developed personal theology, and being an atheist doesn’t necessarily indicate a lack of knowledge of Jewish texts. That said, Einstein’s brilliance in math and physics simply does not convert to spirituality.

We live in a world where we elect bodybuilders to be governors, and movie stars coach us in “the history of psychiatry.” But these crossovers are inevitably embarrassing and unsuccessful. Genius isn’t necessarily transferable, and that’s okay.

A kerfuffle broke out Friday in the atheism comment thread over whether Albert Einstein was an atheist. NoEinstein: Deist, pantheist, or atheist? debate about God is complete without somebody trying to enlist the physicist on their side of the argument.

“Albert Einstein spoke lovingly and deeply of how to him Science and Mathematics and God were all clearly seen in one another,” said one anonymous commenter.

“Einstein was an atheist. People misunderstand him when he makes reference to God,” said another.

He was a pantheist, argued a third, citing Einstein’s quote that “I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and aGod: Angry tribal king of the world, or the beauty in nature?ctions of human beings."

“This canard about Albert Einstein's religious piety just won't die,” moaned yours truly, citing the following quote from Einstein’s letters: “It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."

This all takes us back to Jay Michaelson’s post about defining our terms when we talk about God. If belief in God can mean everything from the worship of a kick-assJay Michaelson: Is he right or is he right? tribal deity in the sky who strikes masturbators dead to an appreciation for the outdoors, then isn’t “God” a “slutty, sloppy, imprecise word,” as I referred to it in the first sentence of the Jewcy Radicals article? “Einstein believed in God” and the opposite are meaningless phrases. As is "I believe in God."

So if the word "God" no longer communicates anything specific, why not just retire it altogether? Will anybody's spirituality suffer if we let go of that one English word in favor of terms and descriptions that actually refer to something specific?

Kentucky Kathmandu,

Joey