PHILOSOPHY - Baruch Spinoza

Baruch Spinoza

was a 17th century Dutch philosopher who tried to reinvent

religion, moving it away from something based on superstition

and ideas of direct divine intervention to being a discipline

that was going to be far more impersonal, quasi scientific

and yet also at times serenely consoling.

Baruch - the word means blessed in Hebrew,

was born in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam in 1632,

a thriving central Jewish commerce in thought. His ancestors were sephardic Jews

who'd fled the Spanish Peninsula following the Catholic conspired

expulsion of 1492

Baruch, a studious, highly intelligent child, received an intensely

traditional Jewish education.

He went to the local Jewish school, the Yeshiva and followed all the Jewish

High Holidays and rituals

But gradually he began to distance himself from the faith of his ancestors.

"Although I have been educated from boyhood in the accepted beliefs

concerning Scripture",

he later wrote with characteristic caution, "I have felt bound

in the end to embrace other views". His fully fleshed-out views

would to be expressed his great work 'The Ethics', written entirely in Latin

and published in 1677. In The Ethics Spinoza directly challenged the main

tenets of Judaism in particular

and organized religion in general. God is not a person who stands outside of nature

there is no one to hear our prayers or to create miracles

or to punish us for misdeeds. There is no afterlife

man is not God's chosen creature. The Bible was only written by

ordinary people. God is not a craftsman or an architect, nor is he a

King or military strategist who calls for believers to take up the Holy Sword.