...This awareness has become a kind of pre-Freudian self-analysis for me; Spinoza helps me to see myself and my surroundings objectively. This can ma… - Benedictus de Spinoza

Most errors consist only in our not rightly applying names to things. For when someone says that the lines which are drawn from the center of a circle to its circumference are unequal, he surely understands (then at least) by a circle something different from what mathematicians understand. Similarly, when men err in calculating they have certain numbers in their mind and different ones on the paper. So if you consider what they have in mind, they really do not err, though they seem to err because we think they have in their mind the numbers which are on the paper. If this were not so, we would not believe that they were erring, just as I did not believe that he was erring whom I recently heard cry out that his courtyard had flown into his neighbor's hen, because what he had in mind seemed sufficiently clear to me.

And most controversies have arisen from this, that men do not rightly explain their own mind, or interpret the mind of the other man badly. For really, when they contradict one another most vehemently, they either have the same thoughts, or they are thinking of different things, so that what they think are errors and absurdities in the other are not.

The only successful attempt to free human reason from the authority of religion was that of Spinoza (1632–1677). In his Theologico-Political Treatise (1670) he denied the claims for divine authority based on the text of Scripture and religious tradition. [...] Spinoza was the first secular Jew, and as such, the first secular man. Indeed, he served as the role model for all secular Jews, instituting the precise features that characterized future Jewish secularists.

أوحي إلى نوح، بطريقةٍ على مستوى فَهْمه، بأنَّ الله سيُهلِك الجنس البشري. الواقع أنَّ نوحًا كان يَعتقِد أنَّ العالم كله، باستثناء فلسطين، لم يكُن مسكونًا، ولم يجهل الأنبياء مِثل هذه الأشياء فحسْب، بل جَهِلوا أيضًا أشياء أخرى كثيرةً أكثر أهمية، ولا يَنقُص جهلهم هذا من تقواهم شيئًا لأنهم لم يقولوا شيئًا خاصًّا يتعلَّق بصفات الله، بل كانت آراؤهم عنه هي بِعَينها الآراء المُتداولة، وكان الوحي الذي هبط عليهم مُتناسبًا مع آرائهم