The human mindset that analyzes the spiritual realm and tries to understand it through purely earthly reason and logic did not end with Greek and Latin translations or interpretations. That way of thinking remained alive through the centuries, changing its form and its language, yet keeping the same root: the belief that the spiritual can be understood, managed, or denied through strictly human logic—and that the human mind can replace the place that belongs only to God in creation. The spiritual realm is God’s domain, and His justice sustains it. It is not ours.
We can speak about earthly matters with clarity and precision—such as the water cycle, biology, or social structure—but we cannot speak about or understand the spiritual realm unless it is through the spirit. Reason and the earthly mind begin to be transformed into a nearly perfect alloy with the Spirit when we reconcile with the Creator. However, that partnership must be developed; it should not remain stagnant. We are created beings, and every creature needs learning, growth, and refinement in order to reach the goal of spiritual maturity.
Spiritual maturity is not an emotional status, nor an intellectual or material achievement. It occurs when the inner nature of the human being has been renewed, refined, and aligned with truth. A spiritually mature person discerns what the flesh cannot see and recognizes the voice of God among many voices. Spiritual maturity is the fruit of relationship with God, not of human effort.
Earthly maturity, by contrast, is simply the ability to function well within the human system. A person may be considered mature by society if they are responsible, work, support a household, fulfill obligations, adapt to the material world, and do not depend on others to live. That is not wrong; it is part of our human experience and necessary for daily life. But that earthly maturity is not spiritual maturity.
Earthly maturity forms functional adults; spiritual maturity forms beings with inner clarity who can discern quickly, understand without strain, see with the spirit before reasoning, grasp the depth and not only the surface. The spirit becomes active and recognizes truth. The spiritually mature person has a transformed heart: absence of resentment, absence of guilt, absence of hatred or envy; the ability to feel without becoming enslaved by feelings; sensitivity to the voice of the Spirit. Spiritual maturity makes a person perceive what comes from God, distinguish what comes from the flesh, sense what is false even when it sounds correct, and recognize what is true even when it hurts.
The spiritually mature person has authentic humility. Spiritual humility is a loving submission to the voice of the Creator. It is not weakness; it is great strength. It is the absence of arrogance and self-deception—deep openness to correction, willingness to learn, and readiness to recognize limits. The spiritually mature person does not need to prove anything. The spiritual person has self-control that does not come from sheer willpower. Spiritual maturity produces an inner mastery that is not repression, not fear, not a social mask, not moralism, not self-driven rigidity, but the fruit of a changed spirit.
Such a person also loves from generosity, compassion, truth, and clarity—not from need, manipulation, control, or grasping. They love without losing their center. They are free from external opinions, inherited patterns, religiosity, imposed guilt, comparisons, fear of judgment. Spiritual maturity frees the soul from all those chains. It brings deep stability. It lives in coherence between inner and outer life. It has the capacity to endure problems without breaking inwardly—not because it is “strong,” but because its center is not earthly. It does not run away, sink, or freeze. It processes, understands, adapts, and grows.
Finally, the spiritually mature person maintains a real connection with God. It is not religion. It is not liturgy. It is not repeating phrases. It is not emotionalism. It is communion, guidance, revelation, clarity, inner direction, and light. It is relationship, not ritual.
When the spirit grows, our gifts reach their full functioning. Reconciliation with God is the first of innumerable steps toward extraordinary possibilities that only a mind transformed by the Spirit can experience. We can reason, think, and interpret using human tools, but we would never reach spiritual understanding by our own logic. The flesh can grasp the material world to a certain point; the spirit grasps the spiritual—and from that place, in perfect balance, it can also understand the material.
There is something striking about those who say they do not believe in God: they argue about Him. They fight with Him. They develop theories to prove, in some way, that He does not exist. The very act of arguing about something they claim does not exist reveals doubt within what they say they believe. I do not speak a single word about what does not exist, because it does not exist. I speak about what exists, not about nothingness. Because if I speak about “nothing,” how do we know it does not exist? The mere fact that I speak about it suggests existence. Doubt is found even in the one who says God does not exist, because the human being—even while denying God—cannot deny their spiritual origin. There is an inner conflict: the mind denies Him, but the spirit recognizes Him. Within us there is a mark that says “I exist,” because the spirit proceeds from Him. That inner presence is there to awaken us spiritually—or, if one prefers, to urge us to reconcile with Him.
When a person rejects or silences that inner voice, they need to replace it with another explanation, because it is like a small flame that never goes out. And that is exactly what certain thinkers have done throughout history: they tried to resolve the spiritual realm through the human mind.
This is how we find thinkers like Descartes, who turned God into a logical idea; Spinoza, who confused Him with nature; or Voltaire, who reduced Him to a distant moral principle. Three different ways of expressing the same inner resistance: refusing to acknowledge that the spiritual is understood through the spirit, not through the mind—and that the One who governs the spiritual is God, not man.
There is something we should understand before speaking more about Descartes and Spinoza—thinkers who, in a certain sense, created their own philosophical religion and prepared the way for modern thinkers. Distorted messages about God’s character, taught as if they were divine inspiration, drive the inquisitive person away from true spirituality, because that person has come to know human nature and begins to distrust what “religion” presents as God. These messages came from the very ones who claimed to teach us about God.
When our spirit receives an incoherent message, logic reacts and rejects it. Our inner spirit always senses that there is “something more.” Some believe that “something more” is extraterrestrials. Others believe we descend from monkeys—an extremely common mistake, because it is not what human science actually teaches. For others, that “something more” is only the human being—mind and short existence. But it is not the mind that tells them there must be something more than our brief passage; it is intuition, or the spirit. That perception exists because we were created from the Spirit of God. And it reveals something deep: the human being is spirit, not only body and mind. There is no person in the world—neither the most skeptical nor the most rational—who has not felt that inward sense some call intuition, a hunch, or a presentiment.
But that feeling or sensation, which becomes an idea, does not come from the mind. The mind does not possess intuition; the mind compares, analyzes, and deduces. The mind gives form and understanding to what the spirit senses. A person can feel deep love for someone and still lack words to express it. Love rises from within. The body expresses it through words or actions—an embrace or a kiss. That deep perception comes from the spirit, because the spirit recognizes truth even when the mind cannot yet shape it into thought. That is why, when a distorted idea about God is presented, the spirit senses it as foreign, and even if the person cannot explain it in the moment, that inner perception remains until the mind finally arrives at a rational conclusion: what I am hearing and reading cannot come from a God they call perfect.
Descartes argued against many medieval teachings—such as those associated with Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo—that claimed God could deceive, harden hearts, or even create spiritual blindness. Those beliefs were influenced by certain passages of the Old Testament. Deception does not come from God but from the creator of lies. And believing that God hardens hearts or creates spiritual blindness is an erroneous interpretation that ignores the reality that we were created free to choose our paths. If we were machines, God could harden our hearts or switch our spiritual sight on and off like a machine with a button. But He cannot do that with us because we are free. We know very well the two words that express our inner will and freedom: I want / I do not want; yes / no. So how could God harden my heart, create my spiritual blindness, or deceive me? If God—who gave us the power to choose—overrode that right, He would be violating His own spiritual law. That would be injustice. No: God does not deceive, does not harden hearts, and does not produce spiritual blindness. We allow those things through our own bad choices.
So logic detects the incoherence of what one hears or reads when teachings claim to come from a just God while portraying Him as unjust. The mind does not stop functioning because someone is not reconciled with God. Intelligence remains active; reason still seeks coherence. That is why so many thinkers rejected God when they saw religion teaching incoherent things. Using logic is not incoherent. What is incoherent is accepting teachings that present God as contradictory or as merely human.
Men like Descartes and Spinoza, who were born and raised within closed religious systems, saw those contradictions and even absurdities. They did not reject the living God; they rejected the religion that claimed to speak in His name. But they did not realize this, and that was their greatest obstacle. They believed God and religion were the same. That is why they invented their own pseudo-spiritual scaffolding to give some logical answer to what their inner life was telling them: in some way, this does not belong to me; this is not Me. What their interior sensed consolidated into thoughts and conclusions—but in the wrong direction.
In Descartes’ system, God is not the living Creator nor the Source of the human spirit. He is a functional element within Descartes’ theory—an instrument. Descartes assigns God a reduced task: to serve as the “guard” who guarantees that the human mind is not completely mistaken. God becomes a gatekeeper, the guardian of reason, nothing more. In Descartes, God does not sustain life, guide the human being, transform, illuminate the spirit, or relate personally. He serves one logical role: ensuring that human thought has validity. In other words, Descartes’ god exists to protect the human being’s confidence in their own mind. It is a functional, mechanical god—without bond, without closeness—at the service of human thinking. Descartes reverses the relationship between God and man: it is not God who sustains man; it is man who assigns God the task of sustaining man’s mind.
Descartes could not separate the true God from the religion he had been taught. And out of that confusion, he replaced spiritual reality with logic, creating his own religion. His famous phrase “I think, therefore I am” gives the mind the creative power of existence. And if my thought gives me the power to exist, then I am what we call god. That is what can be read behind those words. It is completely reasonable to think that, inwardly, Descartes saw God as something articulated by the human mind.
Not because he said it explicitly—he could not—but because the way he defines God, the functional role he assigns Him, and the subordination of the divine to human reason point precisely in that direction. In Cartesian thought, God is not a reality that corrects man; He is an idea man uses to guarantee his own thinking. This inversion of order—creation positioning itself above the Creator—is an eloquent sign.
When Descartes declares human reason to be the supreme criterion for accepting or rejecting anything—including God—he is saying, without saying it: “I decide what kind of god may exist.” It is a spiritual arrogance that says: “I give you your place; I assign your function.” That resonates as the human mind creating the idea of God. It is the same attitude found in Babel, in Greece, in Rome, and in every system where man tries to define and control the spiritual realm from within himself.
Descartes kept God in his equation as much as he had to, but as a subordinate role, because he could not eliminate God entirely in the dangerous environment in which he lived—where, for example, the Inquisition held power over life and death. Thus, out of necessity rather than genuine inner conviction, Descartes retained the figure of God in his system but assigned Him a purely functional role: guaranteeing the clarity of human thought. What he did was a rational reconfiguration of the concept of God: “God was necessary as an idea, not as a reality.”
While Descartes gave God the role of guardian of the mind, Spinoza dissolved God into nature.
In his Theological-Political Treatise, Baruch Spinoza said that “by the government of God I understand the fixed and immutable order of nature, or the chain of natural things.” Earlier, I said that God governs the spiritual domains—and yes, He also has power over the material—but He granted the affairs of the earth to man with full freedom of choice. The physical human being cannot govern nature. That was obvious to Spinoza, as to anyone who observes nature through physical capacities. Spinoza’s reasoning was mistaken in assuming nature is immutable, because it is not. Nature is always in continual change; that is an earthly reality, not a spiritual one.
Spinoza observed that nature cannot be governed by man, and from that perspective he assigned God dominion within nature. Later in his text, Spinoza places man’s domain in the basic work of “knowing things by their first causes; taming our passions; or acquiring the habit of virtue.” When he speaks of “knowing things by their first causes,” he is speaking of the mind, reason, and logic. And when he speaks of controlling passions and acquiring virtue, we see the echo of the Greek teaching that the body is bad and must be tamed.
Controlling passions naturally is extremely difficult. And virtues are not obtained through willpower, human effort, or the habit of practicing them. A person who is truly upright does not become so by rehearsal. We could teach a class on being brave for a year, but if that virtue is not within us, we would not overcome fear through human effort—and I am not speaking of fear as natural physical protection, but of inner fears that do not come from survival instinct. Spinoza also adds that controlling passions and acquiring virtues is human work—that God has nothing to do with it. Passions may indeed be part of human nature. But we cannot control passions and attain integrity by practice. Virtues are gifts of God. Human “taming” of passions through effort, as Spinoza frames it, would be useless. That is why God said through Ezekiel that He would give us a new heart or spirit inclined toward good. Why did He say it? Because human nature that has not undergone spiritual new birth cannot overcome what is negative without the help of the Spirit.
Later, speaking about prophets, Spinoza says: “all the prophets who wrote laws in the name of God… did not conceive their decrees as eternal truths… they did not possess adequate knowledge of Him.” What does that tell me? That he was not speaking about the Major or Minor Prophets, but about Moses. He is literally saying that Moses’ decrees were created by Moses, not as eternal truths but as earthly ones. He then uses Moses as an example and says that Moses ordered the Jews not to steal and not to kill—not as a teacher or prophet, but as a legislator and sovereign. In doing so, he places the entire law of the Old Testament under human creation and says Moses did it solely as a man. God had no involvement.
I can see what his reading was indicating to him—especially regarding the ritual laws attributed to Moses and said to be practiced “forever” in God’s name. I do not know whether Spinoza realized that what he was saying placed those ancient writings under the category of fraud. If they were written to be observed perpetually by God’s command, then those practices should continue forever. From my perspective, teaching decrees in God’s name that were written by man traps the idea of a perfect, all-knowing God in an impossible dilemma. Consequently, the inquisitive mind hears it and stops believing—because, like Descartes, it confuses God with religion. And religion is the creation of laws or commands by man, raised to the level of God’s voice, taught with the claim “God said” when God did not say it. Creating laws in God’s name without them coming from God creates religion.
However, I do not agree with Spinoza’s example claiming that Moses established decrees like “do not steal” or “do not kill” merely as a legislator. Moral laws are spiritual laws. If one follows Spinoza’s inference, it implies that those laws came not from God but from man, therefore they are human creations. His thinking enters dangerous territory by association: God is man, or God was invented by man.
Spinoza also said that the books of the Pentateuch were not written by Moses. For example, when we read about Moses’ death: “So Moses the servant of the Lord died there… and he buried him… and no one knows the place of his burial to this day.” His reasoning, in my opinion, has logic and common sense. If Moses was dead and buried, he could not have been writing about his own death and burial. In that way, Spinoza shattered the belief that the Pentateuch was written entirely by Moses.
Spinoza makes the same error as Descartes. Both decide what God’s domain is: one assigns God to the mind; the other assigns Him to nature. Neither sees God acting in relationship with the human being beyond the role they assign Him. The living God disappears and is replaced by a “function” created by the human mind. If man defines God’s role, man stands above God. If man decides where God acts, man limits God. If man prescribes God’s “work,” man is creating that idea of God. If I determine the boundaries of God’s work, it means I have created Him. And, as I said, this is dangerous territory, because the reader who does not understand these ideas correctly can conclude that God is an invention of man—especially when reading what Spinoza says about Moses. Spinoza affirms that Moses acted as a human legislator; that law did not come from the Spirit but from political power; that commandments were not revealed but “useful.” If one follows that logic, the consequences are clear: if divine law is human, then God did not speak. If God did not speak, then God does not relate to man. If God does not relate, then God is a construction. That is the philosophical problem both systems generate.
When reading Spinoza, one also notices contradictions. For example, he does not fully deny that Moses’ laws were divinely revealed—and then later he does. Those incoherences are the product of the teaching he inherited: the mixing of prophetic voice with human words, presented together as “divine inspiration.” Confusion arises instantly because God’s voice is not man’s voice. Spinoza did not create that confusion. He inherited it and tried to give it order through logic. He saw light at the end of the tunnel but did not reach it because he concluded that all decrees and laws were created by Moses as a man. As a logical consequence, he could not see God in a personal relationship with man; God became a human construction. Therefore he chose another path: he placed God in nature and made Him material. But that was not spiritual teaching. God is spirit. In Spinoza, God becomes matter.
Spinoza asserted that God and Nature are the same (Deus sive Natura). But they are not. Nature and we, in our current human form, are matter. We depend on physical conditions—temperature, water, energy, environmental composition—and we could disappear completely if a cataclysm occurred. God, if He is God, cannot disappear. God lives forever because He is Spirit.
By identifying God with nature, Spinoza granted God a limited, dependent, conditioned existence. To sustain that equation, he assumed nature is immutable and eternal. I understand this as an attempt to explain divine eternity through continuity—through something that “always remains.” But continuity is not true eternity.
If the elements that keep nature alive ceased to exist, nature would also disappear—and with it, that “god.” Then the inevitable question appears: if that god can cease to exist, who created it?
Spinoza—like René Descartes—ended at the same conclusion: the human mind. Both reduced God to an idea, a rational construction necessary for the system, not a living and transcendent Presence.
Neither of them could distinguish between the voice of God and the voice of man in Scripture. They heard only the man. And because they did not recognize the difference, they ended up denying the very possibility of a real spiritual revelation.
This entire journey reveals that the central problem was not a lack of intelligence, observation, or critical capacity, but the standpoint from which the spiritual was approached. The old self—whether religious or philosophical—tries to understand God from an unrenewed mind. It assigns functions, draws boundaries, defines scope, and builds systems to explain what can only be received through the spirit. This is exactly what we see in both religion and philosophy: the same pattern in different language.
The old self seeks to control the spiritual from the human level. When it cannot understand God through relationship, it replaces Him with structure. When it cannot hear the Voice, it substitutes law. When it cannot receive revelation, it turns it into doctrine. When it cannot live communion, it creates ritual. Thus, the spiritual is reduced to a system manageable by the mind. And when that happens, God stops being the living Creator and becomes a functional idea serving human thought.
The renewal of the mind is not a matter of thinking better or reasoning more deeply. It is not an intellectual effort or a moral discipline. The mind is renewed as the consequence of a prior inner transformation. When the spirit is reconciled, the mind is ordered; when the root is restored, understanding aligns. That is why the spiritual cannot be understood by the old self, but by the new self—whose mind no longer governs alone, but responds to an inner life transformed by the Spirit.
The old self analyzes, debates, and constructs theories about God. The new self listens, discerns, and lives from relationship. The first tries to explain God; the second knows Him. And that is the essential difference between authentic spirituality and any system—religious or philosophical—created by the human mind.