The origin of the human being: The one that religion does not want you to know - Baruch Spinoza

By Victor M Fontane

What if the true history of the human being is not in traditional religious texts? Discover what revolutionary ideas Spinoza proposed and why even today they bother so much.

Baruch Spinoza, also known under his Latinized pen name Benedictus de Spinoza, was a philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish origin, who was born in the Dutch Republic. Spinoza rejected the notion of an anthropomorphic, providential God; he argued that miracles are impossible; he demonstrated that the Bible is simply a work of human literature, and he showed that the belief in an afterlife where immortal souls are rewarded or punished is a pernicious superstitious fiction.Spinoza's most famous and provocative idea is that God is not the creator of the world, but that the world is part of God. This is often identified as pantheism, the doctrine that God and the world are the same thing – which conflicts with both Jewish and Christian teachings.“I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.”Albert Einstein stated "I believe in Spinoza's God". He did not believe in a personal God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings, a view which he described as naïve.

Spinoza developed a completely different theory about how humanity arose, a theory that has nothing related to Adan and Eve or divine creation, but what was the human origin and why it is exactly as it is. Spinoza discovered that the human being emerged from nature itself through a process that calls "the necessary deployment of the infinite substance."He showed that human consciousness, our ability to think and reflect on ourselves, was not a divine gift, but the inevitable result of the evolution of matter towards increasingly complex forms of organization.Humanity was not or is special in the religious sense, it is special in a more great sense. It is the way in which the universe had developed the ability to know himself, completely destroying the need for an external creator, an immortal soul separated from the body and the entire guilt structure and redemption on which Western religions were built.

According to Spinoza, the process that gave rise to human beings began billions of years ago, when the first organic molecules began to organize in increasingly complex patterns, nothing mistic, as the natural expression of what the call "Conatus", the fundamental impulse of everything that exists by persevering in their being and expanding its power of action. He also demonstrated that this process is not random or chaotic, but that it follows a necessary internal logic. Matter does not evolve towards complexity by accident , but because the nature of reality tends towards increasingly perfect forms of organization and expression. In this context, the emergence of life is not a miracle, but an inevitable consequence of natural laws. And the appearance of human consciousness is not a divine intervention, but the point in which the material complexity had reached a sufficient level to allow nature to know itself through us humans. Thus, we humans are not a creation separate from nature destined to dominate or transcend it. We are nature itself in its most developed form of self-consciousness.

God is not above or beyond nature, God is nature and we humans are part of God.

The human being is not a condemned sinner who needs external salvation. It is a magnificent expression of natural creativity, capable of understanding its place in the cosmos and acting from that understanding.According to Spinoza, true human freedom does not consist in the ability to arbitrarily choose between alternatives, but to act from an adequate understanding of our nature and circumstances. And true happiness does not depend on the hope of a reward in another life, but on the development of our natural abilities in harmony with the universal order of which we are part. This analysis completely transforms the understanding of fundamental concepts such as love, death, suffering and meaning of existence itself and realization as a human being is part of the self -regulation process of the universe itself.