A now famous, handwritten letter by world renowned physicist, Albert Einstein, is set to go on auction with an opening bid of $3 million. Why the high price? The letter offers exclusive insights into Einstein’s private thoughts, specifically his views on religion.

Einstein wrote the letter on 3 January, 1954, to philosopher Erik Gutkind after he had read Gutkind’s book, “Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt.” In it he writes:

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. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can [for me] change this.

The letter was last sold in 2008 at Bloomsbury Auctions in London to an anonymous buyer for $404 000. Since then it has been stored in a temperature-controlled vault at a public institution.

The auction, which will open on 8 October and close on the 18th of the same month, will be handled by Los Angeles-based auction agency, Auction Cause. President of the agency, Eric Gazin, believes the letter holds valuable significance and that it will demand a very high price, possibly two or three times the amount of the opening bid.

This letter, in my opinion, is really of historical and cultural significance as these are the personal and private thoughts of arguably the smartest man of the 20th century.

eBay has the widest possible audience and it is so global and so accessible,” he explained, adding that 10 years ago the last major Einstein letter sold for more than $2 million.

We feel this [$3 million] is a reasonable starting price given the historic importance and the interest in Einstein.

Below is an image of the full letter as well as a complete transcription into English, from the original German, complete by Auction Cause.

… I read a great deal in the last days of your book, and thank you very much for sending it to me. What especially struck me about it was this. With regard to the factual attitude to life and to the human community we have a great deal in common.

… 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. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions 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.

In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality otherwise accepted, as a Jew the privilege of monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza recognized with all incision, probably as the first one. And the animistic interpretations of the religions of nature are in principle not annulled by monopolization. With such walls we can only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are not furthered by them. On the contrary.

Now that I have quite openly stated our differences in intellectual convictions it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential things, i.e; in our evaluations of human behavior. What separates us are only intellectual ‘props’ and ‘rationalization’ in Freud’s language. Therefore I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things.

With friendly thanks and best wishes,
Yours, A. Einstein

[Source: Reuters, eBay]