Baruch Spinoza

Spinoza is one of the most important philosophers and certainly the most radical of the early modern period. His thought combines a commitment to a number of Cartesian metaphysical and epistemological principles with elements from ancient Stoicism and medieval Jewish rationalism into a nonetheless highly original system. His extremely naturalistic views on God, the world, the human being and knowledge serve to ground a moral philosophy centered on the control of the passions leading to virtue and happiness. They also lay the foundations for a strongly democratic political thought and a deep critique of the pretensions of Scripture and sectarian religion. Of all the philosophers of the seventeenth-century, perhaps none have more relevance today than Spinoza.

Spinoza's metaphysics of God is neatly summed up in a phrase that occurs in the Latin edition of the Ethics: “God, or Nature”,  “That eternal and infinite being we call God, or Nature, acts from the same necessity from which he exists”. It is an ambiguous phrase, since Spinoza could be read as trying either to divinize nature or to naturalize God. But for the careful reader there is no mistaking Spinoza's intention. There are, Spinoza insists, two sides of Nature. First, there is the active, productive aspect of the universe—God and his attributes, from which all else follows. This is what Spinoza, employing the same terms he used in the Short Treatise, calls Natura naturans, “naturing Nature”. Strictly speaking, this is identical with God. The other aspect of the universe is that which is produced and sustained by the active aspect.

Spinoza said the organized religion are empty and meaningless practices, because they had lost their sense of being. He reduces religion to single moral thing: Love your fellow human beings and treat them with justice and charity. This is all that is essential to a true religion, and once again i repeat as he said its a superstition.

Spinoza idea of afterlife was that once you was dead there´s nothing to do , you are dead and it´s all , that no part of you go to other parts such you are dead such your body and mind does , there´s no other parts where you can go or other stuff. Spinoza took the religious doctrine of immortality as a pernicious propagated by ecclesiastics to manipulate beliefs.

Baruch de Spinoza, one of the most important philosophers of his time, and certainly the most radical, was excommunicated from Amsterdam's Sefardic synagogue at the age of twenty-four. The immediate reasons for the cherem pronounced against him remain hidden, although there are some good reasons for thinking that he was already propounding the heretical views that are found in his later writings. In this essay, however, I look closely at the political context for Spinoza's excommunication, especially in the relationship between Amsterdam's Jews and Dutch society.