"Oh yeah and another thing, not a big fan of the English language, or the lack of Trial by Combat in deciding our differences!"

SMBC did an even more accurate version but I didn't want to copy them too much.

They were making a big mistake though, because they didn't realize that in a securlar society you can actually wear even sillier hats.

The Christian authorities in Holland censored Spinoza several times, sometimes even ahead of time before they had read his new work. Apparently once it was because they heard he had an "irrefutable proof that God didn't exist", which is pretty funny because if true, it would be pointless to censor, and instead you should reorganize society into some kind of Democracy, like Spinoza wanted. But people in charge tend to not want to do that, regardless of the truth. Amazing, I know.
I heard that fact (which is more like a rumor, we hardly know the exact reasons he was censored for the most part, but it was usually along those lines) on Rev Left Radio, which just put out a great episode on Spinoza.

"Is that your absolute free decision though, or are you just saying that because of societal expectations?"
"Oh it's authentic. Also I've authentically called the cops just fyi."

Despite popular imagination, people like Sartre never really talk about "the meaning of life". In fact he only mentions it once as far as I can tell, where "meaning" is used as "interpretation", making the point that we interpret our own lives in the same way we interpret novels - after the fact. So if we die halfway through a project, our interpretation might be totally different, so we shouldn't really be too worried about it, in a sense. What matters is our freedom and the decisions we actually make.
Oh and also he was a huge pervert.

John Brown was a deep Christian too, so I don't know maybe there is something to it after all.

Simone Weil was an early 20th century philosopher, and communist. She dedicated most of her early life to politics doing things like building unions and even working in factories to understand the plight of the common worker, for the goal of communism. At this point she was a dedicated pacifist, having witnessed the horror of World War I. However, around the outbreak of World War II she converted to Catholicism, and far from curbing her political aims, she abandoned pacifism and picked up a gun to try to shoot Fascists in Spain, and later trying anything to help the war effort. I went on Rev Left Radio a while ago to talk about her full biography.

The problem with believing society always progresses is that you must also believe that reason always wins the power struggle against stupidity, which I don't know...I'm just not too sure about these days.