Steven Nadler:

For the adherents of these codified superstitions, life is a state of “bondage,” coerced obedience in body and in mind. They live in a state of “deception” and are prevented (sometimes by force) from exercising free judgment. True worship has been replaced by flattery of God, the pursuit of knowledge by servitude to false dogma, and freedom of thought and action by persecution of heterodoxy and nonbelievers. “Piety and religion … take the form of ridiculous mysteries, and men who utterly despise reason, who reject and turn away from the intellect as naturally corrupt — these are the men (and this is of all things the most iniquitous) who are believed to possess the divine light!” Spinoza concludes that if these self-appointed guardians of piety “possessed but a spark of the divine light, they would not indulge in such arrogant ravings, but would study to worship God more wisely and to surpass their fellows in love, as they now do in hate.”

– A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age