Yesterday, like today, Christians and Muslims were killing each other in Iraq, and Jews and Muslims were killing each other in Lebanon. Yesterday, unlike today, was also the 350th anniversary of Spinoza’s excommunication from the Jewish community in Amsterdam. These were the words that excommunicated the philosopher:

Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down, and cursed be he when he rises up; cursed be he when he goes out, and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not pardon him; the anger and wrath of the Lord will rage against the man, and bring upon him all the curses which are written in thr Book of the Law, and the Lord will destroy his name from under the Heavens…

The Amsterdam synagogue excommunicated Spinoza because of his “relentless application of reason” on the nature of God, religion, and human beings. Writes Rebecca Newberger Goldstein:

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 didn’t believe in an afterlife but instead a God who was in the world completely. For him, God was everything, every action, every thought, every word. But positing God as “the all” meant that God was both good and evil, killer and creator, lover and hater. Writes Genevieve Lloyd in Spinoza and The Ethics:

Spinoza introduces a constantly changing God — the ultimate subject of all crimes and infirmities. Such a God…must be full of contradictions. Since there is no other agent or subject of properties than this one indivisible substance, he must hate and love, deny and affirm contradictory things. From the standpoint of morality, this God is an abomination, producing in himself all the follies and iniquities of humankind. All those who say that Germans have killed ten thousand Turks must speak falsely unless they mean that God, modified as Germans, has killed the Turks. All the phrases by which one expresses what men do against one another will have no true sense other than that God hate himself, asks favours of himself and refuses them, persecutes himself, kills himself, eats himself, calumniates himself, throws himself on the scaffold, and so on. Having reduced God to the most perfect simplicity — to the unity and indivisibility of substances — Spinoza must attribute to him the most infamous extravagances that can be conceived, infinitely more ridiculous than those of the poets concerning pagan gods.

From Spinoza’s God emerged Hegel’s Geist; from Hegel’s Geist emerged Marx’s dialectical materialism; and from Marx’s dialectical materialism emerged the end of history and the last man. God is all to nothing.