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For those of you interested in Spinoza, and other philosopher's works on God, I'd like to plug this video [0] that my existentialism & philosophy of religion profesor did. He talks about how much of early modern philosophy is predicated on an understanding of religion, and how people like Spinoza, Hume, and Kant built on those understandings in their work

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBdqt8OaCt0

I think the Reformation/Enlightenment opened up a space for a lot of materialist, atheist thinkers to talk about meaningful ideas, and as long as they left in God and the King as metaphors or symbols they could get away with it, blending into the bizarre background of the myriad Protestantisms. They still couldn't be openly atheist or anti-royal without being tortured or murdered, but before the Church had been weakened, you couldn't even stray a little bit from Catholic Aristotleisms without being imprisoned and killed.

One of my favorite Nietzsche quotes is him saying Spinoza thought dressing up his work in the form of a mathematical treatise was him thinking he was dipping his philosophy in bronze like baby shoes

A bit tangential but I've found fivebooks.com an excellent resource for finding which books to read on a given topic, especially economy.

An Interview about Spinoza