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Originally Posted by metis
Einstein and Spinoza would completely agree with you. Matter of fact, they felt that the concept of a moral God who will reward us for being good and punishing us for being bad is just more anthropomorphizing of God, and Einstein referred to such a belief as being "childish".
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I don't think this was Spinoza's view:
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E4: DEF. 2. By evil I mean that which we certainly know to be a hindrance to us in the attainment of any good. Ethics
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E4: PROP. 28. The mind's highest good is the knowledge of God, and the mind's highest virtue is to know God. Ibid
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E5: PROP. 23. The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but there remains of it something which is eternal. Ibid
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E5: PROP. 29, Note. --Things are conceived by us as actual in two ways; either as existing in relation to a given time and place, or as contained in God and following from the necessity of the divine nature. Whatsoever we conceive in this second way as true or real, we conceive under the form of eternity, and their ideas involve the eternal and infinite essence of God, as we showed in E2P45 and E2P45N, which see. Ibid
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E5: PROP. 30. Our mind, in so far as it knows itself and the body under the form of eternity, has to that extent necessarily a knowledge of God, and knows that it is in God, and is conceived through God.
Proof.-- Eternity is the very essence of God, in so far as this involves necessary existence (E1D8). Therefore to conceive things under the form of eternity, is to conceive things in so far as they are conceived through the essence of God as real entities, or in so far as they involve existence through the essence of God; wherefore our mind, in so far as it conceives itself and the body under the form of eternity, has to that extent necessarily a knowledge of God, and knows, etc. Q.E.D. Ibid
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E2: PROP. 40, Note 2 (...) [(4.)] Besides these two kinds of knowledge, there is, as I will hereafter show, a third kind of knowledge, which we will call intuition. This kind of knowledge proceeds from an adequate idea of the absolute essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things. Ibid
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E4: PROP. 45, Corollary 1.-- Envy, derision, contempt, anger, revenge, and other emotions attributable to hatred, or arising therefrom, are bad;
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E4: PROP. 45, Corollary 2.--Whatsoever we desire from motives of hatred is base, and in a State unjust. Ibid
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E5: PROP. 25. The highest endeavour of the mind, and the highest virtue is to understand things by the third kind of knowledge. Ibid
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E5: PROP. 32. Whatsoever we understand by the third kind of knowledge, we take delight in, and our delight is accompanied by the idea of God as cause. Ibid
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E5: PROP. 33. The intellectual love of God, which arises from the third kind of knowledge, is eternal. Ibid
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E5: PROP. 34 Corollary, Note. --If we look to men's general opinion, we shall see that they are indeed conscious of the eternity of their mind, but that they confuse eternity with duration, and ascribe it to the imagination or the memory which they believe to remain after death. Ibid
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E5: PROP. 38. In proportion as the mind understands more things by the second and third kind of knowledge, it is less subject to those emotions which are evil, and stands in less fear of death. Ibid
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E5: PROP. 39. He, who, possesses a body capable of the greatest number of activities, possesses a mind whereof the greatest part is eternal. Ibid
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E5: PROP. 40, Corollary.--Hence it follows that the part of the mind which endures, be it great or small, is more perfect than the rest.
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So, although Spinoza didn't see God as rewarding saints and punishing sinners, he did believe that goodness was self-rewarding by being eternal, and wickedness was self-punishing by being bodily and stuck in a duration of time. Wickedness is being apart from God and focused on negative emotions.
I'm not sure how Spinoza would have conceived of a hell. It's possible, I think, that he would have thought that hell was not having pure thoughts which connected oneself to the eternal world.
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