"Nothing in the bleak, cold, unfeeling universe was remotely concerned with human aspiration and longing," he (Rubenstein) said at the time. "I found it impossible to believe in a providential God."To this day, Rubenstein's position remains unchanged. The words of 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, he says, best describe modern life as it is increasingly stripped of the constraints of social responsibility: "Short, nasty and brutish."
"I believe in the God of the mystics," he (Rubenstein) says. "The Holy Nothingness whence we came and where we shall return." Belief in the God of the Bible, on the other hand, gave birth to what he calls "the secularization of consciousness which, when carried to an extreme entirely unintended in the Bible, can lead to mass murder."