In this man's major text on religion, he claimed that the persistence of Jews as a race was mainly due to their fastidiousness in requiring circumcision, and that the Torah should not be followed because it was only fit to serve as the state constitution of ancient Israel.
A controversy over this man's religious thought prompted a pamphlet on David Hume's use of a word for "belief." That word, "glaube," was roundly derided in an 18th-century controversy about this man's thought sparked by a conversation about him between Gotthold Lessing and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, the latter of whom maintained that this man was a materialist. In his own time, he was castigated for pointing out that the Bible is "imperfect, corrupt, erroneous, and inconsistent with itself," and fragmentary. In this man's major text on religion, he claimed that the persistence of Jews as a race was mainly due to their fastidiousness in requiring circumcision, and that the Torah should not be followed because it was only fit to serve as the state constitution of ancient Israel. This man's central religious belief was of "Deus sive Natura," signifying his belief that nature and God consisted of one and the same substance. For 10 points, name this author of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.
A controversy over this man's religious thought prompted a pamphlet on David Hume's use of a word for "belief.
Baruch Spinoza [or Benedict(us) de Spinoza; or Benedito or Bento de Espinosa]