Status Updates From A Spinoza Reader: The Ethic...

"They create countless fictions and interpret nature in amazing ways, as if the whole of nature were as insane as they are."

"If men could manage all their affairs by a certain plan, or if fortune were always favorable to them, they would never be in the grip of superstition. But since they generally vacillate wretchedly between hope and fear, from an immoderate desire for the uncertain goods of fortune, for the most part their hearts are ready to believe anything at all."

"…People are not reliably rational. Instead they are regularly subject to passions which are capable of overpowering their rational desires. If they lived according to the guidance of reason, they would be able to posses their natural right to pursue their own interest without injury to anyone else. Because they do not, the state is necessary to prevent outbreaks of violence which would be disadvantageous to all."

Spinoza's God is very much the God of the philosophers, a principle of explanation, a first cause of everything which exists, itself neither needing nor susceptible of explanation by anything external to itself, an eternal, necessary being, standing in contrast with the temporal, contingent beings we find in our daily life, but not a personal being with thoughts, desires, and emotions.

Spinoza's contemporary, Pascal, wrote that 'the God of the philosophers is not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.'