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Baruch Spinoza: Nature
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Spinoza provides an equally deflationary account of God's election, or the "vocation", of the Hebrews. It is "childish", he insists, for anyone to base their happiness on the uniqueness of their gifts; in the case of the Jews, it would be the uniqueness of their being chosen among all people. The ancient Hebrews, in fact, did not surpass other nations in their wisdom or in their proximity to God. They were neither intellectually nor morally superior to other peoples. They were "chosen" only with respect to their social organization and political good fortune. God (or Nature) gave them a set of laws and they obeyed those laws, with the natural result that their society was well-ordered and their autonomous government persisted for a long time.
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Spinoza's concept of God has often been mis-described as deism, theism or pantheism. Spinoza did not believe that God is a separate force from nature and above nature, or a God that is in everything. He believed that God is the sum total of the natural universe. This conception has been called immanence.
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"Actually, the difficulty people told me about wasn't page-by-page, but do to the systematic nature of Spinoza's writing. It was claimed that until you'd mastered the whole thing, you didn't really understand any part of it".
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