Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and Die by Steven Nadler

 

"This all-too-human God does not exist, or so argues the seventeenth-century philosopher Bento de Spinoza. Such a divinity is a superstitious fiction, he claims, grounded in the irrational passions of human beings who daily suffer the vicissitudes of nature. Feeling lost and abandoned in an insecure world that does not cater to their wishes and yet, at the same time finding in that world an order and convenience that seems more than accidental, they imagine a governing Spirit that, on the model of human agency, directs all things toward certain ends."