Snippits from http://members.aol.com/Heraklit1/spinoza.htm
Some quotes from Spinoza’s Manurscript: “Ethics”

God is without passions, neither is he affected by any emotion of pleasure or pain . . .
Strictly speaking, God does not love anyone. [V.17]

He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return. [V.19]

Nature does not work with an end in view.For the eternal and infinite Being, which we call God or Nature, acts by the same necessity as that whereby it exists. . . . Therefore, as he does not exist for the sake of an end, so neither does he act for the sake of an end; of his existence and of his action there is neither origin nor end. [iv. Preface]

God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things. All things which are, are in God. Besides God there can be no substance, that is, nothing in itself external to God. [I.17]



http://pw1.netcom.com/~zeno7/spinoza.html
A snippet from: “Spinoza's God, Individual Choice and Society” - by James Craig Green
The following is a bit of philosophy inspired by the Dutch philospher Spinoza, modified by my own interpretation and experience:
NATURE is everything. There is mass, energy, atoms, molecules, life, thought, people, societies, galaxies and perhaps even multiple universes (pure speculation). But there is nothing outside nature, including spiritual visions and other phenomena we don't yet understand. If they exist, they are part of nature.
Spinoza asserted that for a concept of god to make any sense at all, it must simply be nature. That is, god cannot be something outside nature that controls it, but must necessarily be part of it. According to Spinoza, God IS nature. While Spinoza was excommunicated from his Jewish community in Amsterdam and condemned by Christians as well for being an atheist, he was very devoutly religious. He saw the traditional anthropomorphic (man-like) god as an abomination, completely rejecting the wonder of nature, from which life comes. To Spinoza, nature is the true expression of God. And each of us is part of it. Unfortunately, his highly technical, mathematical style of writing limited widespread appreciation of his work.
The point is, we all come from our environment, live for a while, and return to it. Nothing magical or mystical; just nature and all its various expressions - most of which we do not yet comprehend.

A snippet from: Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. - http://www.friesian.com/spinoza.htm

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) was one of the great philosophers of the age of Rationalism and a major influence thereafter, as on, paradoxically, both of the bitter enemies Arthur Schopenhauer and G.W.F. Hegel. From a Portuguese Jewish family that had fled to the relative tolerance of the Netherlands, one of the most famous things about Spinoza was his expulsion from the Dutch Jewish community. This is often called an "excommunication," though, as I used to have a high school teacher protest, there is really no such thing as "excommunication" in Judaism. Nevertheless, Spinoza was expelled from the Jewish community and anathematized. Although he is today recognized as one of the greatest Jewish philosophers ever, and the chief Rabbis of Israel have been petitioned to formally lift the curse upon him, this has not happened: Spinoza remains a controversial person in Judaism, for very much the same reasons that led to his expulsion in the first place.

Spinoza's God is not the God of Abraham and Isaac, not a personal God at all, and his system provides no reason for the revelatory status of the Bible or the practice of Judaism, or of any religion, for that matter.
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Spinoza's sympathy for Christianity, like Thomas Jefferson's, was entirely for the moral teachings of Jesus, not for the theology, Christology, or the promise of the means of salvation. Like Jefferson, again, Spinoza was a kind of Unitarian, for whom the purely religious aspects of the religions were nearly meaningless.
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Since Spinoza explicitly identifies his God with Nature, it doesn't even seem to be a God at all. How about "the Nature intoxicated man"? Spinoza today is often cited by people who advocate a reductionistic scientism but who are willing to retain some traditional terminology, so that the term "God" adds nothing to the very same natural world described by science. This overlooks a great deal of Spinoza's metaphysics, but the real challenge is how Spinoza's God, even properly conceived, would provide any of the solace, comfort, and meaning of traditional religion to someone like Spinoza. Exactly what was the emotional pull of Spinoza's God on him?
We find the answer to this question in the realization that Spinoza is not entirely a modern thinker and that his God in fact has antecedents in the Middle Ages. It is too easy to get carried away with the evident conformity of Spinoza's system to the requirements of science and overlook the foot that it still has planted firmly in Mediaeval Jewish mysticism. Mediaeval Jewish philosophy, in fact, was closely allied to the Neoplatonic philosophical tradition of Late Antiquity, as this had been taken up and developed during the intellectual flowering of Islâm in the 9th century. The details of Spinoza's metaphysics, ironically but significantly, share much more with Islâmic theology that with that of either Judaism or Christianity.
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While for Spinoza all is God and all is Nature, the active/passive dualism enables us to restore, if we wish, something more like the traditional terms. Natura Naturans is the most God-like side of God, eternal, unchanging, and invisible, while Natura Naturata is the most Nature-like side of God, transient, changing, and visible. When Buddhism says that there is no God, it means that there is no substantive, eternal, unchanging, invisible, and creative side to reality. One of Spinoza's principal metaphysical categories, substance, is explicitly rejected by Buddhism. This is revealing, since it shows us how much there is to Spinoza's metaphysics and Spinoza's conception of God that would not have to be accepted, whether we are comparing it with Buddhism or, more importantly, with a reductionistic scientism.

Spinoza's God does not make choices, does not really have a will -- which would imply deliberation or alternatives.

Spinoza's God is perfect, which means everything is as it must be and cannot be otherwise. God's eternal nature necessitates the things that happen, which happen just as they must and cannot happen otherwise. This all follows from the premise of God's perfection. It is deterministic. Chance or randomness would be an imperfection. Since only God exists, it is also true that God causes everything to happen that does happen. This is the "Occasionalism" developed by the Cartesian Malbranche, that the only cause of anything is God himself; but determinism and occasionalism are also characteristic of Islâmic theology, especially that of al-'Ash'arî (873-935) and of the philosopher al-Ghazâlî (1059-1111). This is Spinoza at his most Islâmic.

However, Spinoza goes a bit further. His God does nothing for any purpose. There are no ends or "final causes" in Spinoza. It would be an insult to God's perfection to imagine that he does things to bring about some end, which would mean to make things better or to bring into existence something that doesn't exist already but should. Things are already perfect, and everything that will ever exist already exists, since God (we recall) is the only thing that exists.

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Sub specie aeternitatis, from the viewpoint of eternity, nothing imperfect ever happens, and we can imagine Spinoza transported right out of his own rather sad and solitary existence into the comforting companionship of God.

This is the key to Spinoza's paradoxical and even disturbing view that things like right and wrong, good and evil, do not exist for God.

Things only appear right or wrong, good or evil, to a self, and the self does not have substantial existence. Spinoza rather heatedly disputes the relevance of this to God, in whom all is perfect. It is only our selfishness that generates these dichotomies.
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While a deterministic Natura Naturata would be a world safe for science, it should now be clear that Spinoza's doctrine allows for the solace of religion by a mystical turn towards something that is invisible to science, the eternal and unchanging Natura Naturans, the infinite essence and existence of God. This is more than enough to enable us to understand Spinoza as the "God intoxicated man," whose convictions got him through the tauma of rejection by his own people and a brief life when it was not even safe to openly publish his views. This all qualifies him, in Schopenhauer's terms, as a Saint -- someone who is no longer troubled by the misfortunes and ordinary expectations of life. It also enables us to see Spinoza in his proper place in the history of Judaism, in the mystical tradition so characteristic of the Middle Ages, but sharing rather more with Islâm and Neoplatonism than with Biblical based Judaism or Christianity.

http://members.aol.com/Heraklit1/spinoza.htm

His philosophy is summarized in the Ethics, a very abstract work, which openly expresses none of the love of nature that might be expected from someone who identified God with nature. And Spinoza's starting point is not nature or the cosmos, but a purely theoretical definition of God. The work then proceeds to prove its conclusions by a method modelled on geometry, through rigorous definitions, axioms, propositions and corollaries. No doubt in this way Spinoza hoped to build his philosophy on the solidest rock, but the method, as well as some of the arguments and definitions, are often unconvincing.

Spinoza believed that everything that exists is God. However, he did not hold the converse view that God is no more than the sum of what exists. God had infinite qualities, of which we can perceive only two, thought and extension. Hence God must also exist in dimensions far beyond those of the visible world.

Significantly, Spinoza titled his chief work The Ethics. He derived an ethic by deduction from fundamental principles, and so his ethics were closely linked to his view of "God or nature" as everything. The highest good, he asserted, was knowledge of God, which was capable of bringing freedom from tyranny by the passions, freedom from fear, resignation to destiny, and true blessedness.

At first Spinoza was reviled as an atheist - and certainly, his God is not the conventional Judo-Christian God. The philosophers of the enlightenment ridiculed his methods - not without some grounds. The romantics, attracted by his identification of God with Nature, rescued him from oblivion.
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http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/s/spinoza.htm
Snippet from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Benedict (Baruch) Spinoza (1632- 1677)

In Part One of the Ethics, "Concerning God," after presenting a short list of definitions and axioms, Spinoza deduces 36 propositions which explain the nature of God. The most important of these is Proposition 14, which expresses Spinoza's pantheism: "Besides God, no substance can be granted or conceived." The term "pantheism" (literally all-God) means that God is identical to the universe as a whole. For example my car, my house, and even I myself are all parts of God. Other Western philosophers before Spinoza advocated pantheism, including Xenophanes, Parmenides, Plotinus, and Meister Eckhardt. However, the vast majority of Western philosophers and theologians strongly rejected this view in favor of a transcendent concept of God which holds that God is distinct from his creation. Indeed, some theologians maintained that God has the attribute of separateness thus being completely separate from the rest of the universe, including the physical world and humans.
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Spinoza next argues that God does not act from a purpose.
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http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pantheism/
Definition Pantheism - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Pantheism is a metaphysical and religious position. Broadly defined it is the view that:
(1) "God is everything and everything is God ... the world is either identical with God or in some way a self-expression of his nature" (Owen 1971: 74). Similarly, it is the view that
(2) (2) everything that exists constitutes a "unity" and this all-inclusive unity is in some sense divine (MacIntyre 1967: 34). A slightly more specific definition is given by Owen (1971: 65) who says
(3) (3) "‘Pantheism’ ... signifies the belief that every existing entity is, only one Being; and that all other forms of reality are either modes (or appearances) of it or identical with it." Even with these definitions there is dispute as to just how pantheism is to be understood and who is and is not a pantheist. Aside from Spinoza, other possible pantheists include some of the Presocratics; Plato; Lao Tzu; Plotinus; Schelling; Hegel; Bruno, Eriugena and Tillich. Possible pantheists among literary figures include Emerson; Walt Whitman, D.H. Lawrence, and Robinson Jeffers. Beethoven (Crabbe 1982) and Martha Graham (Kisselgoff 1987) have also been thought to be pantheistic in some of their work-if not pantheists.

The book recognized as containing the most complete attempt at explaining and defending pantheism from a philosophical perspective is Spinoza's Ethics, finished in 1675 two years before his death.