June 30, 2009

On Doing Your Best

We have to do the best we can. This is our sacred human responsibility.
-Albert Einstein

At the end of the day, as we give our last bit of awakened consciousness to sleep, we have only to answer ourselves one question: "Did I do the best I could today?" 

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June 21, 2009

On the Value of Success, and the Success of Value

"Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value"
-Albert Einstein

Success takes, value gives.  

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May 21, 2009

On Misinterpreting God

"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation and is but a reflection of human frailty."
-Albert Einstein

Man was made in God's image, not He in ours. That we so utterly fail to live up that image is no reflection on God. 

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April 29, 2009

On a Choice of Careers

"The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking… the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind.If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
-Albert Einstein

We have no idea what the consequences of a life's work will be. For some it has been unimaginable, relatively speaking.  

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April 15, 2009

On Taxes

"The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax."

-Albert Einstein

 

Across a nation an entire population grapples with their own understanding of what even Einstein found baffling: April 15th.

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March 31, 2009

On Knowledge and Wisdom

"Perfection of means and confusion of ends seem to characterize our age."
-Albert Einstein

Another way of saying we are much more clever than wise.

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December 6, 2008

On a Rational Understanding of God

"Science not only purifies the religious impulse of the dross of its anthropomorphism but also contributes to a religious spiritualization of our understanding of life.
The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."
-Albert Einstein

Our concept and understanding of God necessarily progresses with our own human evolution and our ability to rise above our our base instincts from which we have emerged from the mists of primordial emergence on this earth.

Fear reflects are base origins as creatures on this earth fighting for survival. We strive for God insofar as we seek a rational understanding of the universe and our place within it.

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October 18, 2008

On Using Religion as a Weapon

“While religion prescribes brotherly love in the relations among the individuals and groups, the actual spectacle more resembles a battlefield than an orchestra.”
-Albert Einstein

The spectacle is on full display in political rallies where the speaker is thought to be “full of the holy spirit” and yet people come away full of hate and suspicion. It is practiced in pulpits that preach that only one particular political ideology is sanctioned by God and all others are abhorrent. It turns the highest aspirations of the truly faithful and thoughtful into a farce, rejecting any real notion of God and instead pandering to fear and division.

It is religion as the oppressor, nothing more than a weapon.

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September 24, 2008

On the Value of Art and the True Artist

“Only to a tiny minority is it given to fascinate their generation by subtle humour and grace and to hold the mirror up to it by the impersonal agency of art. To-day I salute with sincere emotion the supreme master of this method, who has delighted — and educated — us all.”
-Albert Einstein

The artist’s laser-beam, with its wit and easy grace yet also with unrelenting intensity, that reveals to us who we really are and what it means to be human, is a gift beyond accounting, .

From the few, much is given to the many.

 

 

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September 21, 2008

On the Lack of Independent Thinkers in the World

“There are few enough people with sufficient independence to see the weaknesses and follies of their contemporaries and remain themselves untouched by them.”
-Albert Einstein

Too few are of independent and courageous enough mind to see the truth of the world, as humans inhabit it, and not instead get drawn into the seeming propensity for foolishness.

 

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