Great men who believed in God
Culture and society in Malawi are at bay. We proclaim to be a God fearing nation, but atheists, agnostics and religion scoffers are actively at work funded by the sort of rich people to whom Jesus said the camel would find it easier to pass through the eye of a needle than they would enter the Kingdom of heaven.
There are people who having obtained a PhD by licking the boots of Charles Darwin stand on roof tops and proclaim that there is no God. Let us not be misled by such men.
Civilisation owes its existence to the lives of a few great people: philosophers, scientists, writers and statesmen. Most of such men have proclaimed themselves believers in the Deity known by a variety of names such as Creator, God, Yahweh, Allah and so on. Here we introduce a few of these men.
Michael Faraday
He was one of the most brilliant British scientists in the 19th century. It was on the basis of his notes on the researches he had made regarding electricity that the great American investor Thomas Alva invented the electric lamp that has energised economies the world over.
Did Faraday believe in God? He was a member of a sect called Sandemanian which brought together dissidents from the Presbyterian Church of Scotland and from the Church of England.
Albert Einstein (1919-1955)
The world acclaimed him the greatest scientist of the 20th century because of his Theory of Relativity. He is said to have challenged some of Isaac Newton’s legacy.
Did he believe in God and religion? Well, what would you conclude about a man who said “Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind. God does not play dice with this world.”
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
By worldwide consensus, the author of War and Peace, Anna Karenina and numerous novelettes and short stories was the greatest novelist who has ever lived.
He uttered many epigrams having to do with the Christian faith. Among others, he said faith is the force of life. He wrote several polemics on Christian doctrines, some of which alienated him from the Russian Orthodox Church to which he belonged.
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)
India’s greatest writer of the colonial era best remembered for his novella Gitanjali. A Hindu by religion, his expressed beliefs reveal much that is common in the world religions.
He said: “I believe in a spiritual world, not as something separate from this world, but as its innermost truth. With the breath we draw we must feel this truth that we are living in God.” This sounds like Christ saying: “The Kingdom of heaven is within you.”
Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
The father of Indian independence wrote an autobiography titled God is truth. Though a Hindu he spared time to read the Bible.
He did not like the Pentateuch. But he wrote later: “The New Testament produced a different impression, especially the Sermons on the Mount which went straight to my heart. I compared it with the Gita. The verses ‘But I say unto you that you resist no evil, but whoever shall smite thee on the right cheek turn to him the other also. And if any man takes away thy coat let him thy cloak too’ delighted me beyond measure.”
Plato
The ancient Greek philosopher and author of The Republic prayed thus “Lord of Lords grant us the good whether we pray for it or not, but evil keep from us, even though we pray for it.”
Benjamin Franklin
One of the founding fathers of the United States said “I have lived, Sir, a long time and the longer I live, the more convincing proof I see of this truth that God governs the affairs of men. God helps them that help themselves.”
Drafters of the American constitution included a motto “In God we trust.”
Dala, osanamiza wandu! Here is publicly available info about Einstein I have lifted off the Internet : He often used the word “God” or “Old Man” as a metaphor for the Laws of Nature. As a member of the American Humanist Association, there is little reason to think he believed in any kind of personal God. In a letter to Eric Gutkind dated 3 January 1954 he wrote, “The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish… For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. 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.” An earlier letter to M. Berkowitz, dated 25 October 1950, uses hedged words to indicate sympathy towards agnosticism but Einstein pointedly refrains from calling himself agnostic: “My position concerning God is that of an agnostic. I am convinced that a vivid consciousness of the primary importance of moral principles for the betterment and ennoblement of life does not need the idea of a law-giver, especially a law-giver who works on the basis of reward and punishment.” Certainly with this view one cannot call him a Deist as some claim. The careful choice of words thus permits his atheistic view three years later. Einstein publicly claimed on several occasions that he was not an atheist, but it is difficult to square that with the private declarations to Gutkind.
Advisable to do some deeper research into Ancient Wisdom to find symbolic meaning of Kingdom of God and also to properly interpret the parable of rich man failing to enter this Kingdom..All parables are symbols. Therefore, a rich man has an esoteric meaning and not an literal meaning. It may be helpful to study the Egyptian and Nubian symbology to understand sacred books. Try to understand esoteric meaning of Bible stories. Hebrew Moses was trained in the wisdom of Egypt. What was this wisdom? In fact, Moses was known as AmenMoses. Why? It is important to read the Bible and to read about the Bible. It is claimed that Egypt was the light of the world and also cradle of Christianity. Most Bible stories are not historical. These stories were originally not written for the Bible.The Bible is a file for separate books written over a long period of time. They have symbolic language.