Spinoza’s God… and the Brain That Divides Us

 Supposedly, human beings are social by nature. And yet, we live in a global, hyperconnected world with almost unlimited access to information—so why do religion, politics, or identity still divide us?

In the 17th century, a young Dutch philosopher of Sephardic origin, Baruch Spinoza, put forward a radical idea that unsettled Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike. All at once—and for a single reason. “God is not a being separate from the world, but reality itself” (Deus sive Natura), God or Nature. Therefore, God does not belong to any religion, nor does He distinguish between peoples; He is, in essence, the same for all.

Four centuries later, Nobel laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal, through his work in neuroscience, provided a key to understanding why human beings continue to clash.

The brain is not a uniform mass, but a plastic network of interconnected neurons, shaped and reshaped by lived experience. In a sense, we do not perceive the world directly as it is. We reconstruct and model it individually, through prediction and experience, influenced by culture, language, and every situation we encounter.

From this perspective, religion, politics, morality, and identity can be understood as systems of collective interpretation. They are not reality itself, but different ways of translating it. Different cultures. Different languages. Shared symbolic frameworks that lead us to perceive different surfaces, even if the underlying reality might be the same.

This is where Spinoza’s idea takes on a new dimension.

If God—or the ultimate reality that governs the laws of the universe—is one and indifferent to our categories, then our differences do not lie in it, but in us. In our mental structures, in our interpretations.

I observe, not without concern, how today’s society is becoming increasingly divided and polarized—a global phenomenon. Almost any pretext seems enough to fuel division. All of it rooted in accepting dogmas without questioning their nature.

And this is where we enter another debate: power struggles. The manipulation of narratives. Because if our differences arise from the way we interpret reality, then who controls the narrative? And to what extent does it define what we believe to be real?