Roll over, Spinoza.

[shereads]

350 years ago, Spinoza made a logical argument against religious intolerance. It wasn't tolerated.

A view of the truth: Spinoza's faith in reason

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein The New York Times
MONDAY, JULY 31, 2006

Thursday marked the 350th anniversary of the excommunication of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza from the Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam in which he had been raised.

The Spinoza anniversary didn't get a lot of attention. But it's one worth remembering - in large measure because Spinoza's life and thought have the power to illuminate the kind of events that at the moment seem so intractable.

The exact reasons for the excommunication of the 23-year-old Spinoza remain murky, but the reasons he came to be vilified throughout all of Europe are not. Spinoza argued that no group or religion could rightly claim infallible knowledge of the creator's partiality to its beliefs and ways. After the excommunication, he spent the rest of his life - he died in 1677 at the age of 44 - studying the varieties of religious intolerance. The conclusions he drew are still of dismaying relevance.

The Jews who banished Spinoza had themselves been victims of intolerance, refugees from the Spanish-Portuguese Inquisition. The Jews on the Iberian Peninsula had been forced to convert to Christianity at the end of the 15th century. In the intervening century, they had been kept under the vigilant gaze of the Inquisitors, who suspected the "New Christians" of carrying the rejection of Christ in their very blood. It can be argued that the Iberian Inquisition was Europe's first experiment in racialist ideology.

Spinoza's reaction to the religious intolerance he saw around him was to try to think his way out of all sectarian thinking. He understood the powerful tendency in each of us toward developing a view of the truth that favors the circumstances into which we happened to have been born. Self-aggrandizement can be the invisible scaffolding of religion, politics or ideology.

Against this tendency we have no defense but the relentless application of reason. Reason must stand guard against the self-serving false entailments that creep into our thinking, inducing us to believe that we are more cosmically important than we truly are, that we have had bestowed upon us - whether Jew or Christian or Muslim - a privileged position in the narrative of the world's unfolding. Spinoza's system is a long argument for a conclusion as radical in our day as it was in his: that to the extent that we are rational, we each partake in exactly the same identity.

Spinoza's faith in reason as our only hope and redemption is the core of his system, and its consequences reach out in many directions, including the political. Each of us has been endowed with reason, and it is our right, as well as our responsibility, to exercise it. Ceding this faculty to others, to the authorities of either the church or the state, is neither a rational nor an ethical option.

Which is why, for Spinoza, democracy was the most superior form of government. The state, in helping each person to preserve his life and well-being, can legitimately demand sacrifices from us, but it can never relieve us of our responsibility to strive to justify our beliefs in the light of evidence.

It is for this reason that he argued that a government that impedes the development of the sciences subverts the grounds for state legitimacy, which is to provide us physical safety so that we can realize our full potential. And this, too, is why he argued against the influence of clerics in government. Statecraft infused with religion is intrinsically unstable, since it must insist on its version of the truth against all others.

Spinoza's attempt to deduce everything from first principles - that is, without reliance on empirical observation - can strike us today as impractical, and yet his project of radical rationality had concrete consequences. His writings, banned by greater Christian Europe, but continuously read and discussed, played a role in the audacious experiment in rational government that gave birth to the United States.

The Declaration of Independence, that document first drafted by Thomas Jefferson, softly echoes Spinoza. John Locke, Spinoza's contemporary, is a more obvious influence on Jefferson than Spinoza was. But Locke had himself been influenced by Spinoza's ideas on tolerance, freedom and democracy.

If we can hear Locke's influence in the phrase "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," we can also catch the sound of Spinoza addressing us in Jefferson's appeal to the "laws of nature and of nature's God." This is the language of Spinoza's universalist religion, which makes no reference to revelation, but rather to ethical truths that can be discovered through human reason.

Spinoza had argued that our capacity for reason is what makes each of us a thing of inestimable worth. That each individual is worthy of ethical consideration is itself a discoverable law of nature, obviating the appeal to divine revelation. An idea that had caused outrage when Spinoza first proposed it, adding fire to the denunciation of him as a godless immoralist, had found its way into the minds of men who set out to create a government the likes of which had never before been seen.

Spinoza's dream of making us susceptible to the voice of reason might seem hopelessly quixotic now, with religion-infested politics on the march. But imagine how much more impossible a dream it would have seemed on that day 350 years ago. And imagine, too, how much even sorrier our sorry world would have been without it.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is the author, most recently, of "Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity."

 

[Oblimo]

Spinoza was one of the first people to realize that there's a difference between faith and zealotry, that faith need not exclude the possibility of doubt, that doubt need not be considered a sin, and that knowing you are right does not necessarily make the guy who disagrees with you an irrational idiot.

 

[rgraham666]

Thanks sher. Cool article.

I wonder what Spinoza would say of our society, where reason has become the creed of zealots though?

 

[NoJo]

Spinoza was an atheist dude.

 

[cantdog]

I like freethinkers, though.

 

[rgraham666]

I like freethinkers, though.

So do I.

As long as they're not free of ethics as well.

 

[Stella_Omega]

So do I.

As long as they're not free of ethics as well.

oh, piffle.
That same old knee-jerk reaction.
"Freethinkers have no morals"
"Atheists have no morals"

Plenty of people are free of ethics. Many of them claim to be freethinkers because they think it's a good disguise for their essential selfishness.

Others feel that Jesus will forgive them all their unethical behavior, anytime they want to be washed in the Blood of The Lamb.

But, really, their immoral behavior came first. Their belief systems are distorted to become excuses.

sorry, rant over.

 

[NoJo]

Spinoza was able to get his ideas published (anonymously, though) only because he was part of an extraordinarily tolerant Flemish society. That tolerance in turn had a number of causes, rooted in the Reformation.


Spinoza was at the vanguard of rationalist thought, and was generally villified at the time. He was an outcast from Jewish orthodoxy, but lived 200 years before the time when people could publish such radical views openly. He received death threats and was stabbed in the face.

Let's never forget the bravery and sacrifice it took to establish atheism, which some of us might take for granted.

 

[rgraham666]

oh, piffle.
That same old knee-jerk reaction.
"Freethinkers have no morals"
"Atheists have no morals"

Plenty of people are free of ethics. Many of them claim to be freethinkers because they think it's a good disguise for their essential selfishness.

Others feel that Jesus will forgive them all their unethical behavior, anytime they want to be washed in the Blood of The Lamb.

But, really, their immoral behavior came first. Their belief systems are distorted to become excuses.

sorry, rant over.

I'm hurt, Stella. I thought you knew me better than that.

 

[wazhazhe]

Roll over Sinoza, I gotta hear it again today.

Roll over Sinoza and tell Tschaikowsky the news.

Roll over Sinoza rockin in two by two.

Roll over Sinoza and dig these rhythm and blues.


Chuck Berry would be rollin’ over in his grave … if he was dead.

 

[NoJo]

Roll over Sinoza, I gotta hear it again today.

Roll over Sinoza and tell Tschaikowsky the news.

Roll over Sinoza rockin in two by two.

Roll over Sinoza and dig these rhythm and blues.


Chuck Berry would be rollin’ over in his grave … if he was dead.

Chuck Berry wouldn't know your skit from Sinoza

 

[cantdog]

Rationalism held out hope, then, for a better world. Divine-right kings ruled by iron whim, and the situation was even worse in religion. Ideas only flourished with patronage. He couldn't have known how it would turn out.

 

[MagicaPractica]

"And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.

Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terrible, stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.

This is not her story."

~ Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Quite frankly, I think religion is an excuse people have used to group and exclude others. If it wasn't there they'd find something else, and have at different times.

 

[NoJo]

"And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.

Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terrible, stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.

This is not her story."

~ Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Quite frankly, I think religion is an excuse people have used to group and exclude others. If it wasn't there they'd find something else, and have at different times.

That's a criticism you could perhaps level at organized religion, but I don't that think that's fair to say of the sometimes very private religious sense, of the existence a deity, that many (most?) people have.

 

[rgraham666]

Actually the Vogons tore the Earth down for a hyperspace bypass.

Luckily for us, there was a backup.

The Vogons, now there was a perfectly rational species. The boring, amoral bastards.

 

[MagicaPractica]

That's a criticism you could perhaps level at organized religion, but I don't that think that's fair to say of the sometimes very private religious sense, of the existence a deity, that many (most?) people have.

Thank you. I didn't mean to suggest that religion is only an excuse. What I meant to say is that it has been used by many, many people over centuries as an excuse.

 

[MagicaPractica]

Actually the Vogons tore the Earth down for a hyperspace bypass.

Luckily for us, there was a backup.

The Vogons, now there was a perfectly rational species. The boring, amoral bastards.

Just don't let them read you any poetry.

 

[rgraham666]

Just don't let them read you any poetry.

They have.

Why do you think I'm such a strange person?

 

[MagicaPractica]

They have.

Why do you think I'm such a strange person?

Isn't that a relative term? I really hadn't noticed anything strange about you. But then, I used to be in love with Ford Prefect. *sigh* Those men from Betelgeuse.

 

[Stella_Omega]

I'm hurt, Stella. I thought you knew me better than that.

Sorry- Lost my sense of humor there...

It's a battle I'm fighting quite a lot, right now. I am dealing with some seriously myopic Christians- the kind that make that sort of assumption. The kind that ONLY do the right thing because God is watching.

 

[cantdog]

Or Santa

 

[cantdog]

I don't think that's a real morality, if you get told it and follow for that reason. It's just herd behavior, then.


But what do I know? The herd always picked me last.

 

[SeaCat]

Sorry- Lost my sense of humor there...

It's a battle I'm fighting quite a lot, right now. I am dealing with some seriously myopic Christians- the kind that make that sort of assumption. The kind that ONLY do the right thing because God is watching.

Welcome to Life Stella.

Cant is correct in his statement. Religeon has been used as an excuse to commit some of the worst attrocities in history. The saddest part is that many of these attrocities were commited by your normal everyday person, the kind who would make a good neighbor if he or she hadn't been brainwashed by their religious leaders.

Cat

 

[rgraham666]

Sorry- Lost my sense of humor there...

It's a battle I'm fighting quite a lot, right now. I am dealing with some seriously myopic Christians- the kind that make that sort of assumption. The kind that ONLY do the right thing because God is watching.

That's OK. *HUGS*

A lot of 'freethinkers' are the same way. We even have a couple on this board.

 

[cantdog]

Welcome to Life Stella.

Cant is correct in his statement. Religeon has been used as an excuse to commit some of the worst attrocities in history. The saddest part is that many of these attrocities were commited by your normal everyday person, the kind who would make a good neighbor if he or she hadn't been brainwashed by their religious leaders.

Cat

Boyzo. I don't recall saying anything very much like that, actually.