After the Ethics, i'd like to introduce you to another major work in this chapter that will help you understand Spinoza's philosophical and political influence, particularly on the coming Enlightenment and on liberal and, in our case, libertarian currents.

This is the Traité théologico-politique, or TTP, published anonymously in 1670.

Spinoza (1632-1677) wrote this book while interrupting the writing of his Ethics, in an attempt to put an end to a misunderstanding that still exists today. It's the belief that he was an atheist.

As we have seen, Spinoza's concept of God is the subject of the entire first part of the Ethics, in which he demonstrates not only god's existence but also what his true nature is.

And since Spinoza's concepts are generally quite difficult to grasp, it is often easier to understand them by saying what they are not, rather than by trying to say what they are. An approach which, incidentally and as we shall see later, is very useful for understanding Bitcoin.

This is how Spinoza shows us that God, in his view, is not an anthropomorphic being endowed with intentions, punishing or rewarding, to whom we would speak and who would listen to us according to a ritual that we may or may not follow. In other words, according to him, God is not an old man with a long white beard hidden behind a cloud who would solve the world's difficulties and make us dependent on him.

So to speak of God is to evoke Nature as a unique, infinite and eternal Substance, made up of an infinite number of attributes, of which us human beings know only two: matter, or the extent, and thought.

This is the famous "Deus Sive Natura" from which Spinoza derives the concept of absolute determinism and the idea that man is not a cause of himself and is not above Nature, and is certainly not above animals.

But beyond a critique of religion, the TTP is above all an opportunity for Spinoza to make a severe criticism of the religious people, and of theocracy. In other words, religious power cultivates fear and superstition, and he says, activates the sad passions of individuals to better enslave them, trapping them in delusion, fanaticism and war.

In this primary, infantile stage of religion, believers become attached only to external worship and a credulous faith based on prejudice. A stage in which religion becomes mechanically intolerant, strays from the limits of its moral teaching, and turns away from its vocation to promote peace and harmony by claiming to hold the truth.

However, once we move beyond rational criticism of religion, for example by exegeting the Bible, Spinoza wants to convince us that this new vision of God is entirely compatible with the messages of justice and charity of the three great religions of the Book, which set out a simple but often forgotten golden rule: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself".

But that's not all.

This mature vision of religion developed in the TTP is accompanied by a political dimension, the necessity of separating religion and state in order to protect freedom of thought and belief, in the interests of both all individuals and the state itself.

Basically, Spinoza makes freedom, within the framework of reason, an essential condition for human beings to live without being enslaved by a power opposed to their interests, and therefore he defends a direct democracy based on political and religious freedom.

In other words, freedom of thought and belief, so that people can break free from servitude and from false, infantilizing beliefs, to reason as adults, giving priority to reason and also, as far as we're concerned, to technological progress.

The infamous earthquake in Lisbon on November 1, 1755, showed a major shift in the way people thought about natural events and disasters, and about how to protect themselves against them.

This terrible earthquake destroyed the city and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, many of whom were in church at that moment, since it was All Saints’ Day, which added to the survivors’ incomprehension.

A drama that revived the question posed by the German philosopher and mathematician Leibniz (1646-1716) about the anthropomorphic vision of a God endowed with intention, goodness, and omnipotence. For if God were good, as Leibniz says in his Theodicy, then he would not be omnipotent, since he would allow such catastrophes, and if he were omnipotent, then he would not be good, since he could not prevent them.

Far beyond damning the hand of God, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) wrote to Voltaire, who was struck by the injustice and horrors discriminately suffered by humankind, that "nature was not evil in itself, and that we should not see in it any divine hand that would explain its design".

To which Voltaire (1694-1778), a Spinozist if ever there was one, replied that this natural catastrophe should above all make us realize that the scientific means to protect ourselves from nature did exist, and that the challenge of their time was therefore to ask whether human beings could, thanks to the knowledge and progress, take their future into their own hands and free themselves from theology and superstition.

And while it was, of course, not a question of preventing earthquakes, which are still not only unpredictable but also completely uncontrollable, it was more a question of ensuring that, for example, homes were built to withstand them.

This is why the 18th century Enlightenment, thanks to the exercise of reason, science and technology, is the century of progress. In other words, progress as a tool of freedom.