[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.
