Analyzing Spinoza's Conception Of God

Conception of God:
Spinoza follows the Stoics in drawing a distinction between rational action as self-caused activity and passions as external determination, he does state in a clear sense that “God alone is a free cause. For God alone exists only from the necessity of his nature… and acts from the necessity for his nature.” All other beings are “determined to exist and act by another and to produce an effect in a certain determinate manner.” God alone is an infinite being, and therefore is completely self-determined because there is nothing outside him that could limit him. For Spinoza, to know what we are depends on knowing what the universe or God is, because Spinoza sees us as limitations in God or the universe.
With that beings said,
It is rightly seen that in contrast with Spinoza’s concept of virtue as social and political, the virtue of the Stoic sage is indifferent to the social and the political. It involves teleology, and perfectionism implying total control over the passions, and self-sufficiency, all of which Spinoza rejects. Spinoza identifies social ethics with the struggle to render the passive affects as active affects stating “ethics is a matter of continual struggle against more powerful forces that can never be
Spinoza and the Stoics disagree upon the content of therapeutic disillusionment, and a difference regarding the foundation of politics initially emerges here. It has already been mentioned previously in this essay that Spinoza’s universe is not welcoming to the human spirit in that it is determined like any other body of nature, and this treatment of human nature means that persons are engaged in the pursuit of power like any other bodies. The pursuit of power is the essence of all beings according to Spinoza and this proves to be a fundamentally social pursuit.
In any case, the pertinent problem that Spinoza faces in his political philosophy and why one necessitates political society is the ignorance of which society is symptomatic. He states the following:
“If men were so constituted by nature as to desire nothing but what is prescribed by true reason, men do seek their own advantage, but by no means from the dictates of sound reason. For the most part the objectives they seek…. Are determined only by fleshly desire, and they are carried away by their emotions.”
On the whole, however the relation to politics is problematic: not only should the wise man keep some distance from political action; he is also a citizen of the world rather than of a particular