Part 2/10:
Baruch Spinoza was a 17th-century philosopher often considered one of the most controversial thinkers of his time. Excommunicated from his Jewish community in Amsterdam, his radical perspectives centered around a unified view of God and nature. Rather than seeing God as a distant entity, Spinoza proposed that God is synonymous with the very fabric of the universe—a concept he articulated as "Deus sive Natura" or "God or Nature."