Baruch Spinoza Quotes
If a triangle could speak, it would say, in like manner, that God is eminently triangular, while a circle would say that the divine nature is eminently circular. Thus each would ascribe to God its own attributes, would assume itself to be like God, and look on everything else as ill-shaped.
Spinoza’s ideas were considered so radical and dangerous that he was, perhaps, the only man in history who was excommunicated by the Catholics, the Jews, and the Muslims.
Benedict Spinoza, Letter to Hugo Boxel, 1674
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See {589333} for a similar theme of God vis a vis man.
Early Christianity had a wide diversity of sect and opinion.
“Mussalman” was another name for a Muslim. Jinnah was arguing for a separate Muslim state within India. 7 years later he got is wish and Pakistan was born. However many Muslims chose to remain in India even though it was a majority Hindu state. Jinnah was right for many Muslims and wrong for many others who have integrated into Indian society and there is some intermarriage in India, which has 120 million Muslims, almost as many as Pakistan with 160 million.
This quotation produces much angst among some fundamentalist Christians, Jews and Muslims for whom any concept of multiple deities is distressing as is the notion that man might aspire to become God. This and polygamy are two of the central reasons that some Christians deny that Mormonism is a Christian religion.
His concept of the devine however was quite different and much more abstract than the Rabbis, Priests and Imams of the time. Albert Einstein, was a religious Jew, but his view of God was that of Spinoza (See Quotation 631763) who had been excommunicated by the Jews. Spinoza’s ideas were considered so radical and dangerous that he was the only man in history who was excommunicated by the Catholics, the Jews and the Muslims. Spinoza did not believe in a kins of anthropromorphic God who fabricated the earth and the stars. He saw God in the devine nature of the earth and the heavens and the mathematical rules that govern everything. It was this abstraction that was Spinoza's God which made sense to Einstein. Got was in the order, physical laws and mathematics of the universe. Modern scientists who are religious have no difficulty with the probablsitic nature of much of the physics that governs the univrese. It was God who created or more abstractly, was the mathematical and physical laws that in turn allowed the universe to be created from nothing.
Baruch (de) Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese Sephardi origin. One of the early thinkers of the Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism, including modern conceptions of the self and the universe, he came to be considered one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy. Inspired by the groundbreaking ideas of René Descartes, Spinoza became a leading philosophical figure of the Dutch Golden Age. Spinoza's given name, which means "Blessed", varies among different languages. In the Netherlands he used the Portuguese name Bento. In his Latin and Dutch works, he used Latin: Benedictus de Spinoza.
