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Preface
Summary
Does that man, pray, renounce all religion, who declares that God must be acknowledged as the highest good, and that he must be loved as such in a free spirit? And that in this alone does our supreme happiness and our highest freedom consist? And further, that the reward of virtue is virtue itself, while the punishment of folly and weakness is folly itself? And lastly, that everyone is in duty bound to love his neighbor and obey the commands of the sovereign power? I not only said this explicitly, but also proved it with the strongest arguments.
(Letters 43, to Velthuysen)It is tempting to read Spinoza as a philosopher who tried to distance himself from religion. After all, although he argues for the existence of an immutable and eternal substance he calls “God” this substance has no personal features and no concern for the welfare of humanity. And although he argues for the eternality of the mind, this eternality is nothing like an afterlife in which the just are rewarded and the unjust punished. He argues against even the possibility of miracles, and he regards scripture as “erroneous, mutilated, corrupt and inconsistent” (Theological-Political 12.1). If he had founded a church it is hard to see what the parishioners would do in it, apart from learning geometry, metaphysics and the natural and social sciences.
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- Spinoza's Radical TheologyThe Metaphysics of the Infinite, pp. xiii - xviPublisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2013