Spinoza at the root of my philosophy (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, April 29, 2016, 16:32 (3129 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: 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=...-QUOTE: "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.-David's 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.-Wow, what an eye-opener! Although it's sometimes difficult to tell how much of this is Spinoza and how much is Steven Nadler (I was somewhat taken aback to see the references to Huckleberry Finn and Hard Times!), the direct quotes make it clear why Spinoza was such a thorn in the side of his religious contemporaries and is so popular and relevant today. As for your own beliefs, I'm a bit surprised to find him "at the root of your philosophy". After all, he emphatically rejects dualism and the idea of an afterlife, neither of which has anything to do with “the complexities that underlie nature”. And according to Nadler: “Spinoza is often labelled a ‘pantheist', but ‘atheist' is a more appropriate term. Spinoza does not divinise Nature.” Your acknowledgement that “God may well be very impersonal like raw Nature” sits uneasily with your insistence on divine teleology, particularly with regard to the special status of humans. You yourself quoted this: "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.” But perhaps I am being naughty here, as you confined yourself to “elements of my beliefs”. What strikes me most is his humanitarianism and his hostility towards all repressive authority - religious (including the Bible), social and political.-Here are a few more quotes that caught my eye and mind:-As Spinoza eloquently puts it, ‘the free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death'.-(Re the Bible): Texts from a number of authors of various socio-economic backgrounds, writing at different points over a long stretch of time and in differing historical and political circumstances, were passed down through generations in copies after copies after copies.
Finally, a selection of these writings was put together (with some arbitrariness, Spinoza insists) in the Second Temple period.-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.-True religion is nothing more than moral behaviour. It is not what you believe, but what you do that matters.-The most tyrannical government will be one where the individual is denied the freedom to express and to communicate to others what he thinks, and a moderate government is one where this freedom is granted to every man.-Many thanks, David, for this most illuminating article.