Spinoza's Nondualism. Clare Carlisle talks with Mark Vernon about her book, Spinoza's Religion 

I think so too and wonder if we are working our way back to Hinduism.

Perhaps this will help. Pretend you are Spinoza and you understand all the flaws and nonsense of religious dogma, including the endless, irrational conjecture about an entity called God. So you look for a better word. You come up with Nature, from which nothing can be excluded, even irrational and halucinatory thoughts. You see how religions are used by people to control other people. In other words, it is a power grab which finds its worst form when the state and the religion are one. You realize that religion and politics are ruled by the human psyche and human emotions, that what isn't physical or metaphysical reality is psychological reality. So, you start to write the Ethics: starting with metaphysics and ending with psychology. Once you grasp the metaphysics (substance, consisting of its two attributes thought and extension, for which there is no further reduction, and the infinite modes of substance coming into and out of 'present' existence eternally), you begin to find answers to all possible questions. All the great philosophers who came after realized what Spinoza did. But some of them went on to write nonsense and gibberish anyway. If reading the Ethics is too problematic (and I sympathize), by all means read the writings of Stephen Nadler, the great Spinoza scholar and biographer.

“All things, I say, are in God and move in God. ... However, as to the view of certain people that [my book] the Tractatus TheologicoPoliticus rests on the identification of God with Nature (by the latter of which they understand a kind of mass or corporeal matter) they are quite mistaken.” Spinoza in a letter to Henry Oldenburg. That settles it for me. Also, I didn’t hear anyone claim Spinoza invented a religion, or was doing ‘theology.’

@@JS-ln4ns Correct. Spinoza's letter to Oldenburg states it explicitly. Thanks for the quote.

Greettings. Theos=God, a=means, absent of. Atheist, absence of God. In Spinoza Ethics, he afirms that everything is God. In Part Five, he afirms that our salvation and real liberty comes from Loving God - Amor Dei. How can you claim that he is an atheist? I believe that's not a correct or a fair interpretation of his thought. Sure he doesnt have a traditional vision of God, as a personal being or as trancendent. But he claims that the existance of God is demonstrated by reason and it is a proven true proposition. Clearly he is not an atheist. He has singular conception of God, evidently. In the citation mentioned, he is saying that God is not just extension or matter and movement, that we can perceive. In what we delimitate as nature. God has infinite atributes. Extension is one of them and is also absolute infinite, per definition outside human delimitation.

@@aritovi Read my first sentence again: "Spinoza was an atheist, given his definition of God, as no such God is known in any theology or religion." Spinoza was a genius. He was also no fool. By defining God, he enabled himself to say he was not an atheist. This was a ruse to prevent the authorities from arresting him and probably hanging him. His definition of God holds true. In fact, it is the only definition of God that is true. But it literally denies all other definitions of God, and that makes Spinoza an atheist. There is no theology there. And that is genius.

@@palladin331 Thank you for your reply. But let me disagree with you. He was excomunicated from his sefardite community at young age, refused a job as a teacher in a respected university, kept his work secret for years, his Ethics was published by friends after his dead. His work as it is, will not prevented his hanging, and he knew that. Why do you think he is not saying what he really means? If he says love of God, he means love of God, not a absence of God.