Embracing Spinoza

I just finished reading Betraying Spinoza by Rebecca Goldstein. It is a wonderful book that focuses on Baruch Spinoza's philosophy and Baruch Spinoza the man. In describing Spinoza's philosophy, Ms. Goldstein writes:

It is the self-deceptive fabrications that emanate out of these two weaknesses in our human nature - self aggrandizement and death terror, both of them aspects of our own frightening and incurable finitude - that account for the fearsome force of the superstitious forms of religion "It is fear, then, that engenders, preserves and fosters superstition," observes Spinoza in the preface of his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Spinoza distinguishes between religion, which he endorses, and superstitions, which he condemns. Superstitions, as opposed to religion, offer us false cures for our finitude. They make us believe that we are more cosmically important than we are, that we have bestowed on us - whether Jew, or Christian, or Moslem - a privileged position in the narrative of the world's unfolding. And they make us believe that we can, if we have jumped through the right hoops, live on after our bodily deaths.

Spinoza also wrote:

Superstitious persons, who know better how to rail at vice than how to teach virtue, and who strive not to guide men by reason, but so to restrain them that they would rather escape evil than love virtue, have no other aim but to make others as wretched as themselves. Wherefore it is nothing wonderful, if they be generally troublesome and odious to their fellow-man.

Spinoza’s ideas still resonate today and it is unfortunate that mankind has not progressed very far in its thinking in the 350 years since Spinoza lived. Perhaps the world would be in a better state today if it had embraced Spinoza’s form of rationalism.