Spinoza at the root of my philosophy (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, April 29, 2016, 02:36 (2913 days ago)

Baruch Spinoza was thrown out of his congregation for believing God is Nature, that is God is not the God of the OT. I take his thoughts one step further. We know God through the natural wonders He created. Spinoza could not have realized the complexities that underlie nature. He could well have believed, like Darwin, that life and its parts were simply vital blobs, not requiring the complexity we have found since Darwin made his theory:-https://aeon.co/essays/at-a-time-of-zealotry-spinoza-matters-more-than-ever?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=ced3a77f14-Daily_Newsletter_28_April_20164_28_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-ced3a77f14-68942561-"What is remarkable is how popular this heretic remains nearly three and a half centuries after his death, and not just among scholars. Spinoza's contemporaries, René Descartes and Gottfried Leibniz, made enormously important and influential contributions to the rise of modern philosophy and science, but you won't find many committed Cartesians or Leibnizians around today. The Spinozists, however, walk among us. They are non-academic devotees who form Spinoza societies and study groups, who gather to read him in public libraries and in synagogues and Jewish community centres. Hundreds of people, of various political and religious persuasions, will turn out for a day of lectures on Spinoza, whether or not they have ever read him. There have been novels, poems, sculptures, paintings, even plays and operas devoted to Spinoza. This is all a very good thing.-"It is also a very curious thing. Why should a 17th-century Portuguese-Jewish philosopher whose dense and opaque writings are notoriously difficult to understand incite such passionate devotion, even obsession, among a lay audience in the 21st century?-***-"Spinoza's philosophy is founded upon a rejection of the God that informs the Abrahamic religions. His God lacks all the psychological and moral characteristics of a transcendent, providential deity. The Deus of Spinoza's philosophical masterpiece, the Ethics (1677), is not a kind of person. It has no beliefs, hopes, desires or emotions. Nor is Spinoza's God a good, wise and just lawgiver who will reward those who obey its commands and punish those who go astray. For Spinoza, God is Nature, and all there is is Nature (his phrase is Deus sive Natura, ‘God or Nature'). Whatever is exists in Nature, and happens with a necessity imposed by the laws of Nature. There is nothing beyond Nature and there are no departures from Nature's order - miracles and the supernatural are an impossibility.-"There are no values in Nature. Nothing is intrinsically good or bad, nor does Nature or anything in Nature exist for the sake of some purpose.-***-"The elimination of a providential God helps to cast doubt on what Spinoza regards as one of the most pernicious doctrines promoted by organised religions: the immortality of the soul and the divine judgment it will undergo in some world-to-come. If a person believes that God will reward the virtuous and punish the vicious, one's life will be governed by the emotions of hope and fear: hope that one is among the elect, fear that one is destined for eternal damnation. A life dominated by such irrational passions is, in Spinoza's terms, a life of ‘bondage' rather than a life of rational freedom.-***-"One of Spinoza's more famous, influential and incendiary doctrines concerns the origin and status of Scripture. The Bible, Spinoza argues in the Theological-Political Treatise, was not literally authored by God. God or Nature is metaphysically incapable of proclaiming or dictating, much less writing, anything. Scripture is not ‘a message for mankind sent down by God from heaven'. Rather, it is a very mundane document.-***-"The ultimate teaching of Scripture, whether the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Gospels, is in fact a rather simple one: practice justice and loving-kindness to your fellow human beings."-Comment: Elements of my beliefs follow Spinoza. I do not follow the Bible, I don't believe in the reward and punishment theme of religions; God may well be very impersonal like raw Nature. There is much more to this essay than my comparison to me and well worth reading. The author is an expert on Spinoza with published books.