Another fine article on Spinoza, this one by Steven Nadler with the title,
Why was Spinoza Excommunicated? He sounds like any one of a large number of academic backyard barbeque atheists but what makes him so extraordinary is that he was the first person ever to say what he said.

What God is, for Spinoza, is Nature itself—the infinite, eternal, and necessarily existing substance of the universe. God or Nature just is; and whatever else is, is ‘in’ or a part of God or Nature. Put another way, there is only Nature and its power; and everything that happens, happens in and by Nature. There is no transcendent or even immanent supernatural deity; there is nothing whatsoever outside of or distinct from Nature and independent of its processes.

Spinoza’s God is definitely not a God to whom one would pray or give worship or to whom one would turn for comfort.

What follows from Spinoza’s philosophical theology is that there can be no such thing as divine creation, at least as this is traditionally understood. Nature itself always was and always will be. This means, too, that Nature does not have any teleological framework—it was not made to serve any purpose and does not exist for the sake of any end. ‘All the prejudices I here undertake to expose,’ Spinoza says in the Ethics, ‘depend on this one: that men commonly suppose that all natural things act, as men do, on account of an end; indeed, they maintain as certain that God himself directs all things to some certain end, for they say that God has made all things for man, and man that he might worship God.’

And on it goes.