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metis · #12 (**permalink**) 14th May 2008, 03:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Harvey1

I don't think this was Spinoza's view.

Here's what I had written:

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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".

Here's your follow up:

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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.

Everything's fine until your last sentence. What I'm going to do is to quote from Wikipedia, even though it's not my favorite source by any means (but it saves time):

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He contended that everything that exists in Nature/Universe is one Reality (substance) and there is only one set of rules governing the whole of the reality which surrounds us and of which we are part. Spinoza viewed God and Nature as two names for the same reality, namely the single substance (meaning "to stand beneath" rather than "matter") that is the basis of the universe and of which all lesser "entities" are actually modes or modifications, that all things are determined by Nature to exist and cause effects, and that the complex chain of cause and effect is only understood in part. That humans presume themselves to have free will, he argues, is a result of their awareness of appetites while being unable to understand the reasons why they want and act as they do....

The consequences of Spinoza's system also envisage a God that does not rule over the universe by providence, but a God which itself is the deterministic system of which everything in nature is a part. Thus, God is the natural world and He has no personality...

For him, even human behaviour is fully determined, with freedom being our capacity to know we are determined and to understand why we act as we do. So freedom is not the possibility to say "no" to what happens to us but the possibility to say "yes" and fully understand why things should necessarily happen that way. By forming more "adequate" ideas about what we do and our emotions or affections, we become the adequate cause of our effects (internal or external), which entails an increase in activity (versus passivity). This means that we become both more free and more like God, as Spinoza argues in the Scholium to Prop. 49, Part II. However, Spinoza also held that everything must necessarily happen the way that it does. Therefore, there is no free will...

Some of Spinoza's philosophical positions are:

The natural world is infinite.
Good and evil are related to human pleasure and pain.
Everything done by humans and other animals is excellent and divine.
All rights are derived from the State.
Animals can be used in any way by people for the benefit of the human race, according to a rational consideration of the benefit as well as the animal's status in nature.