Middle ground

"It was not a punishment but a privilege to be perched midway between microcosm and macrocosm, between the fleeting moment and fathomless eternity. Small enough to stand in awe of our infinite cosmos, yet large enough to enjoy the little things; conscious enough to contemplate our own mortality, and yet long-lived enough to feel a tender appreciation for a flower’s ephemeral existence—truly, we found ourselves inhabiting a magical middle ground."

"I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein" by Kieran Fox: https://a.co/dMsYwSS

Superman with a Plan

Deists' vision of a god who's left the building was decidedly not Einstein's god...

"...pantheism is often confused with more traditional creeds that accept some kind of Creator. The easiest mistake to make is to conflate pantheism with Deism. Deism rose to prominence during the Age of Enlightenment as a kind of comforting compromise that made Christian faith compatible with the more critical modern mentality. Easily mocked ideas like miracles, divine revelation, and the literal truth of the Bible were dismissed in deference to the discoveries of science. But the basic belief persisted that a Creator God fashioned our universe with a purpose and a plan. From the Deist perspective, the orderly laws of physical existence and the miraculous organization of living beings provided incontrovertible evidence for God’s existence and His goodness.134 You don’t hear the word Deism much these days, but the idea lives on among its intellectual descendants: creationism and intelligent design.

Although Einstein was often accused of atheism, it doesn’t seem like anyone thought of him as a Deist during his own lifetime. But over the last couple of decades, this has become the dominant narrative defining his spirituality. One biographer has suggested that Einstein “settled into a deism” in later life and embraced a “middle-age deistic faith.”135 Time magazine, celebrating Einstein as its “Person of the Century,” hailed him as “a philosopher with faith both in science and in the beauty of God’s handiwork.”136 And Einstein has even been (mis)quoted as saying, “I believe in God; I have a very deep faith.… There’s a spirit manifest in the laws of the universe… and to me that explains my faith in a Creator and a faith in God.”"

"I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein" by Kieran Fox: https://a.co/0l7smwE

Humanist

🧠💛 What is a humanist?
A humanist is a non-religious person who believes this is the one life we have — and that we should use it to make the world a kinder, fairer place.
We base our decisions on reason, empathy, and a concern for humanity, other living beings, and our shared planet. 🌍

https://www.threads.com/@humanists_uk/post/DKADBg0NVCw?xmt=AQF0h-T92yn88OIz6blZm2ufRxVAs4uoz8R1xfx30cUXjg

Spinoza's god

"But as Einstein once said, “mere unbelief in a personal God is no philosophy at all,” and Spinoza likewise had no intention of stopping at skepticism.21 Although he was denounced by the orthodox as “an atheist, a scoffer at religion,” Spinoza’s dream was not to denigrate the divine but rather to demonstrate that it was disseminated everywhere.22 And in his subsequent works, the immanent divine became Spinoza’s central theme. He argued that a single inscrutable Substance was the substrate of all things—everything around us and everything within, matter and mind alike.23 For Spinoza, this Substance was “conceived through itself” and consisted of “infinite attributes,” all of which were simply expressions of an “eternal and infinite essence.”24 We could call it whatever we wanted—Substance, Nature, or even God—but as far as Spinoza was concerned, “it is the same, or not very different, to assert that all things emanate necessarily from God’s nature and that the universe is God.”25 From this seemingly simple assertion, he concluded that “all things are united through Nature, and they are united into one, namely, God.”26

Spinoza’s contemporaries were convinced that this made him an atheist..."

"I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein" by Kieran Fox: https://a.co/eZtQYsn

Look up for wonder & awe

"In emphasizing awe, Einstein was parting ways with most past religious teachers, but he still had plenty of predecessors. Socrates said some twenty-five hundred years ago that “wonder is the mark of the philosopher.”6 Schopenhauer saw “the sense of the sublime” as a sure sign of a higher mind.7 And one of Lao Tzu’s last lessons in the Tao Te Ching is “Let not your consciousness of life become shallow, and never allow yourself to become weary of existence.”8

Aligning himself with all these first-rate philosophers, Einstein maintained that mere existence was marvelous. “Every thinking person,” he felt, “must be filled with wonder and awe just by looking up at the stars.”"

"I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein" by Kieran Fox : https://a.co/6Tqi73c

Einstein's God

"“By virtue of its simplicity,” Einstein realized, the idea of a personal God was “accessible to the most undeveloped mind,” and accessibility had its advantages. “But on the other hand,” he continued, “there are decisive weaknesses attached to this idea in itself, which have been painfully felt since the beginning of history.”103 Einstein’s acceptance of traditional faith was not a matter of tolerance, then, or even agnosticism, but rather resignation. In a letter written in 1920, he lamented that “even nowadays, eliminating the sacred traditions would still mean spiritual and moral impoverishment—as gross and ugly as the attitude and actions of the clergy may be in many respects.”104 And so, although he rejected monotheism in principle, he accepted people’s faith in a personal God as a necessary evil (or expedient) in practice. Some scholars, such as Max Jammer and the theologian Alister McGrath, have interpreted this stance as tacit support for traditional religion, but “better than nothing” is pretty faint praise.105

Ultimately, what worried Einstein wasn’t unbelief in God, but the absence of any big-picture perspective at all. He abhorred nihilism, not atheism. For him, a life lived without a sense of wonder and purpose was no life at all. “What is the meaning of human life, or for that matter, of the life of any creature?” he once asked. “To know an answer to this question means to be religious.… The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unhappy but hardly fit for life.”106

As a culture, we might feel that we’ve adequately assimilated the hard lessons of physics and philosophy over the last few hundred years: God is dead, Nature is probabilistic, nothing is true, everything is permitted. And perhaps we have become sufficiently skeptical, secular, and cynical. But a naïve, rather nasty nihilism was not the endgame Einstein had in mind. His third-phase spirituality was more than just “sexed-up atheism” or “watered-down theism.”107 Einstein saw that a genuine sense of awe was in short supply among complacent believers and fanatical atheists alike. And this ephemeral feeling was so important to him that he would make wonder the central axis around which his entire spirituality revolved."

"I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein" by Kieran Fox: https://a.co/1GGNLcf

The only “island of meaning”?

Humbling, clarifying… but, "terrifying"? Perhaps in the same way being responsible for your children's well-being can be terrifying: an awesome responsibility, but profoundly meaningful and purpose-giving.

Brian Cox shares some Sagan-esque cosmic philosophy with Colbert:

@profbriancox explores the wonder of human life set against the vast backdrop of galaxies captured by the James Webb Space Telescope.

https://www.threads.com/@colbertlateshow/post/DJnhTd_vT00?xmt=AQF0YikHmhrFtU5gnzj__Zawf3E4XgjDImP6h-wyz7D59w

“no other life but this”

"However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you think. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, difficult as it is...
You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this." - Henry Thoreau

How to Survive the Trump Years With Your Spirit Intact

"…the eternal forces of dehumanization are blowing strong right now: concentrated power; authoritarianism; materialism; runaway technology; a presidential administration at war with the arts, universities and sciences; a president who guts Christianity while pretending to govern in its name.

On the other hand, there are millions of humanists — secular and religious — repulsed by what they see. History is often driven by those people who are quietly repulsed for a while and then find their voice. I suspect different kinds of humanists will gather and invent other cultural movements. They will ask the eternal humanistic questions: What does it mean to be human? What is the best way to live? What is the nature of the common humanity that binds us together? 

…"

David Brooks

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/01/opinion/trump-faith-humanism.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Oxymorons by William Matthews |

"…Religious freedom—doesn't that sound good?"

…

https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2014%252F05%252F03.html