Thursday, January 29

"... maybe at the very bottom of it... I really don't like god. It's silly to say I don't like god because I don't believe in god... but in the same sense that I don't like lago or I don't like the Reverend Slope or any of the other villians of literature. The god of traditional Judaism and Christianity and Islam seems to be a terrible character. He's a god who's obsessed with the degree to which people worship him and anxious to punish with the most awful torments those who don't worship him in the right way. Now I realize that many people don't believe in that anymore who call themselves Muslims or Jews or Christians but that is the traditional god and he's a terrible character. I don't like him. I had a friend, now dead, Abdus Salam, a very devout Muslim, who was trying to bring science into the universities in the Gulf states. And he told me that he had a terrible time because although they were very receptive to technology, they felt that science would be a corrosive to religious belief and they were worried about it. Damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive of religious belief... and it's a good thing, too." -Steven Weinberg, Nobel laureate in Physics