Spinoza

 [Snippets from Steven Nadler's A Book Forged In Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age]

Spinoza laid the groundwork for subsequent liberal, secular, and democratic thinking. 

"True religion" consists only in a simple moral rule: love your neighbor.

Spinoza was excommunicated from Amsterdam Jewry at age 23.

Religion as we know it is nothing more than organized superstition, grounded not in reason but in ignorance, hope, and fear.

Spinoza wants to see a politics of hope (for eternal reward) and fear (of eternal punishment) replaced by a politics of reason, virtue, freedom, and moral behavior.

God ≡ Nature

Imagination and Intellect: The improvement of one entails the weakening of the other.

Spinoza was the most prominent early modern model of the secular individual.

Philosophy, that is, the pursuit of knowledge, and religion have nothing to do with one another.

Faith requires only such beliefs that strengthen the will to love one's neighbor.

The ultimate purpose of the state is the cultivation of reason.

This scandalous work — a book that denied the divinity of the Bible, ruled out the possibility of miracles, identified God's providence with the laws of nature, deflated the revelations of the prophets, and reduced religion to a simple moral code.

After several years, the book was banned in the Dutch Republic. 

George Eliot

 [Evangelical Teaching, 1855]

Given, a man with moderate intellect, a moral standard not higher than the average, some rhetorical affluence and great glibness of speech, what is the career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he may most easily attain power and reputation in English society? Where is that Goshen of mediocrity in which a smattering of science and learning will pass for profound instruction, where platitudes will be accepted as wisdom, bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, unctuous egoism as God-given piety?  Let such a man become an evangelical preacher; he will then find it possible to reconcile small ability with great ambition, superficial knowledge with the prestige of erudition, a middling morale with a high reputation for sanctity.