The thinking of Spinoza from the 1600's has influenced great thinkers from his time onward.
Einstein, when asked if he believed in God, answered that he believed in Spinoza's God. Basically, Spinoza equated God with nature. God is the energy that organizes and participates in the orderly expression of nature. There are inconvertible laws, such as gravity and even not yet known laws, that operate throughout creation.
One of the ideas he presented was that people flourish when they can question and think and discuss in freedom. These ideas influenced the Enlightenment as well as our own Thomas Jefferson.
Currently, the freedom of speech that he declared as fundamental to our ability to flourish, is now under attack. Somehow we got polarized so that people are not free to discuss without fear of being cancelled, fired from jobs, and ridiculed. A small segment of society seems to have decided they know the truth, and they alone know. It is settled so that any discussion to the contrary is folly and even criminal.
We need to grab back our free speech, free thinking, free and abundant life of questing for understanding. I agree with Spinoza, we cannot flourish without it.
Have the courage to not allow others to stop the discussions of free people. Have the courage to hold a point of view that seems reasonable to you, and at the same time the courage to look at all sides and all points of view. We might learn something. There is more than meets the eye of any point we might see. There is always another way to look at anything. We cannot know all that is possible to know, but we can grow to consider as much as we can. Life is not either or. Sometimes it's both and.
No comments:
Post a Comment