Agreed when you take into context EVERYTHING in all his writtings. But the idea is to not just put the quote by itself but also show the full context and WHY the theist wrongfully and even willfully use it out of context.

So what does Einstein mean with this quote? Post that as well.

The quote mine would be, "Science without religion is lame" - Albert Einstein 

http://www.celebatheists.com/wiki/Albert_Einstein

Context of Darwin quote to make Widdle Bri-Bri happy (don't wag the finger at me any more)

"To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of Spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei ["the voice of the people = the voice of God "], as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certain the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, should not be considered as subversive of the theory."

Counter-intuitive, yes. A theistic "gotcha"? Not even close.

Why do they use it? They assume that we are as foolish as they are.

I didn't know - I thought I came up with it on my own.

That's what I get for thinking I can be original.

OK, I did not know that you wanted this to be an essay contest. Since I am not the only one who missed that, I shall fail to shed a tear over the matter.

So let me get back to that quote:

science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

The fact is that, as with most quote mine jobs, this is ripped from it's appropriate context. In so doing, it is generally left to the reader to link to whatever context happens to fit the individual preconceptions. Used in this case, it seems to convey some idea that Einstein was “into religion” whatever that means.

One point, which is only worth mentioning in passing, is that Einstein was an ethnic Jew and therefore would have been unlikely to have been into some flavor of christianity.

Still, one really needs to have some awareness of the actual context in which the remark was made. If one considers his other writings on the subject, he was not even into a specific belief which arose from some ancient books.

Rather, when Einstein spoke of religion, he spoke in one of two contexts. On entry point into his thoughts comes from his outright rejection of the common concept of the god of the omni powers. Many times in his writings, he made observations such as 'An omnipotent god could not be a god capable of rendering judgment on the beings of his creations. To do so would be essentially the same as rendering judgment on his own actions'.

More to the point for the above quote is that he was speaking in the context of a belief in religion as something which arose from the nature of the universe. Fairly similar to the god outlined by Jefferson or Spinoza.

That considered, what Einstein spoke of was the much more general idea that there is a sense in which men may come to know the universe on many levels. However, to engage in such forms of inquiry, on must be imbued with the sense that such inquiry is worthwhile. If one has that sense of the spirit of inquiry, then one may ask all manner of questions.

For example, one can ask where Jupiter will be in three years and there are a set of fairly trivial equations that will provide an answer which is good enough. However, one may as easily ask if it is reasonable to attempt to predict the weather, a matter that then as now, there are no trivial equations for determining what will happen three days from now. In his view, what matters is not which god is important but rather that one is imbued with the idea that it is reasonable to ask such questions in the first place.