Albert Einstein could be considered a “secular’ Jew. Or maybe a “lapsed” Jew. He stated that he lost his religion at age 12, and never regained it. Writing in a letter dated in 1954, he said “the word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. The problem of God “is too vast for our limited minds.” The Jewish religion, like all others, is “an incarnation of the most childish superstitions.” As for fellow Jews, he said “As far as my experience goes they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise, I cannot see anything ‘chosen’ about them.” Although he consistently called the idea of a personal God who answers prayers as naïve, and life after death as wishful thinking, he resented being called an atheist. “If something is in me that can be called religious, then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as science can reveal it.”
