The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (2325 page)

(Skt., ‘a boil’). In Hindu understanding, the capacity of meaning to burst forth (as from a lanced boil) from the sound (
abda
) of words, because all sound has the potential to manifest the source of sound, namely,
Brahman
.

 
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(1632–77).
Jewish philosopher. Despite his traditional education in Amsterdam, he associated with free-thinkers in his youth, and was
excommunicated
from the community in 1656. His
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
(1670, published anonymously) was a work of biblical criticism which questioned revealed religion, opposed persecuting churches (including
Calvinism
), and argued for religious freedom. His major work,
Ethics
, was not published until after his death. His
pantheistic
, impersonal God was completely alien to the Jewish community and he remained under a ban (
erem
) for the rest of his life, once the edict had been issued.
In contrast, Novalis called him
Gott-trunckener Mensch
(‘God-intoxicated man’), and there is no doubt of the centrality of God in his understanding of all things.
Spinoza began with axioms which had to be true because they could not logically be denied. But looking at it, so to speak, backwards, and tracing the chain of propositions back to deductions back to axioms, everything is logically and actually dependent on an absolutely infinite Being whose existence cannot be denied, and this is what Spinoza called God, though equally it is Nature—understood in this way; hence his saying,
Deus sive Natura
. Clearly this is far from the personal creator outside and apart from his creation. Spinoza allowed a small space for human endeavour (
conatus
) within the strictly determined, and that was in the human effort to raise its life above all that seeks to destroy it, including passions and emotions. This effort to become ‘the captain of one's soul’ and to rise above passion through reason is called ‘the concept of positive freedom’, and has been an important goal in other systems of ethics.

 
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see
HOLY SPIRIT
.

 
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Spiritual
.

A type of American folk hymn of the 18th–19th cent. ‘White’ spirituals appeared on the American frontier, in the forms of religious ballads and camp-meeting choruses, characterized by repetitions and refrains. ‘Black’ spirituals, the religious songs of slaves, are better known, partly on account of their musical idiom, and partly because of the intensity of feeling.

 
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Spiritual Baptists
.

A group, known as ‘Shouters’ in Trinidad and Granada, and as ‘Shakers’ in St Vincent, representing an Afro-Protestant
syncretism
within autonomous congregations mainly of African descent. This started on St Vincent in the late 19th cent. Although outlawed 1912–65, it survived underground and is now publicly accepted.

 
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