Rationality Quotes September 2012

Jayson_Virissimo

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Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

That seems really odd to me, coming from Spinoza. I've never read him, but I thought that he was supposed to believe that God and Nature are the same thing. Does he do that, but then also investigate the nature of God through analyzing the way that Nature's laws work? How does he reconcile those two positions, I guess, is what I'm asking.

Can someone more familiar with his work than I help me out here?

Spinoza held that God and Nature are the same thing.

His reasoning in a nutshell: an infinite being would need to have everything else as a part of it, so God has to just be the entire universe. It's not clear whether he really thought of God as a conscious agent, although he did think that there were "ideas" in God's mind (read: the Universe) and that these perfectly coincided with the existance of real objects in the world. As an example, he seems to reject the notion of God as picking from among possible worlds and "choosing" the best... (read more)

3Tyrrell_McAllister14y

Are you reacting to Spinoza's mention of "miracles" and "gods"? Spinoza held that there are no miracles in the sense that everything without exception proceeds according to cause and effect. So he must mean something like "alleged miracles". As for the "gods", they are mentioned only as part of the belief system of the "common people".

0hairyfigment14y

What do you- he's a pantheist. Contemporaries called him an atheist because his position works exactly like atheism.