Baruch Spinoza Quotes
If you find the light of Scripture clearer than the light of reason (which also is given us by divine wisdom), you are doubtless right in your own conscience in making your reason yield. For my part, since I plainly confess that I do not understand the Scriptures, though I have spent many years upon them, and since I know that when once I have a firm proof I cannot by any course of thought come to doubt of it, I rest wholly upon that which my understanding commends to me, without any suspicion that I am deceived therein, or that the Scriptures, even though I do not search them, can speak against it. For one truth cannot conflict with another.
Benedict Spinoza, Letter to Hugo Boxel. 1674
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Al-Maarri’s quotations are not only meaningful in their own right, but they illustrate the openness and free thinking that was allowed in the early days of Islam before about 1100. If anyone wrote such things today in most Islamic countries he would at least be jailed if not executed for blasphemy. And if any Christian in Europe made the same statement, he would have been excommunicated at least if not tortured and murdered.
This view was infuriating to the Rabbis, Priests and Immams of the time. Miracles and Scrip[ture were not determinatve Spinoza taught but the issue was did the docrine of the religion make sense. 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.
Although a conservative, he had a great tolerance for and understanding of other points of view. For this some people thought him a radical.
Elijah Ben Solomon -- Vilna Gaon. The Torah is the first 5 books of the Old Testament which the Jewish People regard as the basis of religion. For many, the interpretation is that of many Fundamentalist Christians and Jews that the Bible contains truth and all truth. However, there were those who have claimed that in addition to the words and their meaning, there is a code in the Bible that gives prophetic information, claiming that all major subsequent historical events were predicted in the Biblical code.
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.
