Spinoza regarded God as the fundamental reality which all thing are part of and not as a being with human forms or attributes. This is how he sums it up:
“The mind of God is all the mentality that is scattered over space and time, the diffused consciousness that animates the world.”
He was aware that his work was controversial and that he could be punished by the Church. As he wrote in a letter to a friend,
“I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.”