Welcome to Gaia! ::

I agree with Einstein entirely and thank you for sharing the quote. I think he was not just one of the smartest men but one of the wisest.

well, i realy don't know what to say about it. on the one hand he makes a point, but i do feel here that he is overexaggerating the nessecity for a very fluffy ideal of "right". not everything is good and light and love and happiness, and it shouldn't be. by denying the acceptance of pain and suffering and defeat, he is devaluing the very hope and happiness he speaks about.

be appy with what you are given, find the joy in all things, but also accept the pain in life.

it's not that i missed that. one the main reasons i love and respect Einstein so much is his understanding of the importance that Faith and Moral value have, and that Science is only one part of the equation.

it is just that i feel in the exact words used, he is glorifying Hope and Morals to the potential exclusion of Science. it souns as though he means that if he had to choose between the one or th eother he would choose his Faith.

that's not wrong at all to say, especially considering it sounds like smething he would have said during WWII when some of his colleagues sold themselves out for military research. in that context it is perfectly right in my opinion, and i agree.

but as an overall thing, i feel that i could not part with one over the other, and would simply refuse the idea of having to choose between the two.

i like to think that true Spirituality is coming back, through realizing that even Science is finding alot of common beliefs and mythologies that were merely known without reason to actually be true. in this generation there is a certain coming-together of Scientific logic and Mythological belief.

I'm not as optimistic.

Let's put it this way, when it came to major developments that changed the way we looked at the world or lived within it throughout the course of human history we've generally had centuries to cope with and eventually adapt to these changes. We used to take the time to figure out how they would fit into our lives and what they would mean to us on a spiritual level in addition to whatever the change itself was.

Now if you look at humanity since the onslaught of the Industrial Revolution, no such thing. Science and technology have constantly thrown changes at us one after the other so rapidly that our way of life is vastly different in less than the span of a decade. There's more and more that gets tossed our way and we just 'accept' until the next best thing comes along, especially when it comes to technology and what we actually DO with science, to what we apply it rather than what we simply observe.

With spirituality now-a-days, it seems we're too busy arguing semantics and dogma to really look at the big picture and ask over all what we're doing.

In small ways I'll agree with you. The 'Green' and Conservation movements are excellent examples of times when we do stop and say 'Whoa whoa wait a second there, look what we're doing to our environment!' The instances of such things occurring though are, unfortunately, far too few. For the most part we still push science and technology further and further at blinding rates. Let's take the laws that got pushed recently that require vehicles to all have a certain fuel mileage by a certain year. Yes, we're acknowledging that there was a problem with the fossil fuels we've been using but we're still pushing the same principles that caused the problem in the first place, which was technological advancement that went far too fast for us to really question and test it. How do we know in taking our dependence off of fossil fuels we're not actually encouraging another problem that could possibly be more severe than the one we currently have?

I'll believe that society as a whole is going towards a more enlightened and spiritual path when we HALT our progress and stop to question it and study it. When we question what it is we have done and truly take the time to look at all the consequences of what science and technology has wrought, then spirituality will be gaining strength. Until then, we're still bearing ignorance as to what the consequences of our own actions are and make quick assumptions based on 'convenience' more than morality or faith.

In an instance such as that, the spiritual answer won't be the easy answer. It would take time, prayer, and meditation to come to. You can show empirically through science how some things are detrimental, but for the most part the moral answer or the answer of faith must be taken through more transcendental means.

And honestly, that just might have been what Einstein was trying to say all along. Looking back it makes sense. His contributions to science were just as quickly applied to technology almost as soon as he had discovered them, such as with the development of the atomic bomb. I think he would have preferred that we questioned what the science meant to us rather than trying to use it as quickly as possible in an arms race. It seemed at the time like a good idea for the sake and convenience of the war, but in the end turned out to be far more detrimental than we conceived it could be.

Faith and Reason.

Reason is actually one of the point in the Wesleyan quadrangle, which United Methodists use to help judge their faith. It's reason, scripture, experience, and prayer.