Here is more opinion that Spinoza was inventing a new god becos it was less dangerous than being an athiest in his time.
Kenneth Novis says the case hinges on how you define ‘God’.
philosophynow.org
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n his lifetime Spinoza published only two books: the
Principles of Cartesian Philosophy and the
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. The
Ethics and several other shorter works, such as the
Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, were all discovered and published after his death by his followers. Of the two works published during his own life, only the first was printed in Spinoza’s own name. Despite this, authorship of the
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus was quickly traced to him, and he thereafter acquired the reputation of being a dangerous atheist, especially among those who had deigned to read the work. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), a contemporary of Spinoza, described the book with the Latin ‘
male’, meaning ‘evil’.
Spinoza was very wary of religious persecution. He opted to publish the
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus anonymously largely because of his previous experiences of it, not only at the hands of the Sephardic community that expelled him, but also as it was wreaked upon his friend Adriaan Koerbagh in 1668 for espousing similar views. In light of this knowledge, sense can be made of what philosopher André Tosel refers to as “the operation of ‘
sive’”. The Latin ‘
sive’, at use in Spinoza’s epigram ‘
Deus sive Natura’, plays the rhetorical function, Tosel argues, of forming an esoteric register whose purpose was to deceive censors and religious detractors. The disappearance of the
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus’ naturalism in the later
Ethics, and the reappearance there of the distinction between
natura naturans and
natura naturata, would on this reading, be to hoodwink theist readers, under the cipher of the ‘
sive’. But in Spinoza’s ‘God, or Nature’, nature plays the determining role. Why then was it necessary to introduce the name of ‘God’ at all? Perhaps it was just to speak his message in words which would be listened to by his contemporaries. This message – deduced by Leibniz – was only ever that “there is no happiness other than the tranquillity of a life here below content with its own lot” (
Two Sects of Naturalists, 1680).
For Spinoza, speaking the language of theism was overall the only available route towards obtaining an audience; and what the most vigilant among this audience heard, piercing as they did through Spinoza’s merely nominal references to God, was the deepest of all atheisms. It was an atheism which sought to argue not only for the non-existence of a personal God, but for the fault of statesmen in having made a world where belief in God was necessary for human happiness.<<