ABSTRACT
The works of Spinoza seem highly topical. He advocated complete freedom of thought and speech. Everyone must be allowed to develop their own way of thinking and to express it, in print if they so wished. Spinoza was a champion of broad toleration and an opponent of revealed religions and those regimes that derived their authority from them. Church and state must always be totally separate. Spinoza rejected the notion of the supernatural power of God and wrote of a God that was the equivalent of nature (Deus sive Natura). Spinoza’s ideas created a fundamentally new vision of humanity, God and the universe.
