Combining Texts

Ideas for 'fragments/reports', 'The Ethics' and 'Notebooks'

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3 ideas

29. Religion / B. Monotheistic Religion / 4. Christianity / a. Christianity
We cannot speak against Christianity without anger, or speak for it without love [Joubert]
     Full Idea: We cannot speak against Christianity without anger, or speak for it without love.
     From: Joseph Joubert (Notebooks [1800], 1801)
     A reaction: This seems to be rather true at the present time, when a wave of anti-religious books is sweeping through our culture. Presumably this remark used to be true of ancient paganism, but it died away. Christianity, though, is very personal.
29. Religion / D. Religious Issues / 2. Immortality / a. Immortality
After death, something eternal remains of the mind [Spinoza]
     Full Idea: The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but something of it remains which is eternal.
     From: Baruch de Spinoza (The Ethics [1675], V Pr 23)
     A reaction: This sounds contrary to Spinoza's monism of mind and body, but he seems to mean little more than that minds are reabsorbed into the whole. See Beth Lord's commentary [p.146]. Compare stoics on the subject.
Spinoza's theory of mind implies that there is no immortality [Spinoza, by Stewart,M]
     Full Idea: A final (and for his contemporaries, dreadful) consequence of Spinoza's theory of the mind is that there is no personal immortality.
     From: report of Baruch de Spinoza (The Ethics [1675]) by Matthew Stewart - The Courtier and the Heretic Ch.10
     A reaction: For Spinoza's view of the mind, see Idea 4308. The denial of immortality would also seem to be a consequence of modern emergentist views of the mind, which is espoused by religious people looking for a compromise between dualism and science.