Spinoza was a really odd guy, who dabbled in both religion and ethics but mostly in religion. He had a number of important and somewhat revolutionary things to say about the nature of God, rather than His existence (which would occupy the time of Berkeley, for example)
Spinoza was born a Jew in Amsterdam, so he was exposed to a lot of Jewish teachings, but he himself did not agree with many of them. He didn't like the idea of divine intervention, and was convinced that God didn't really care about the goings-on of humanity, rather, he was more interested in keeping things running and in balance. This ever-so-slightly eastern take on religion was only the beginning of Spinoza's quest to reform religion into a science-based set of teachings... which would fail epically but more on that later, maybe.
This version of God that Spinoza- and later Einstein, even- would accept was an impartial, passive being that merely existed. Everything that is, is God. Actually, this coincides with a number of philosophies about God- and it even agrees with Christianity, to a certain extent. The perfection that is God mandates that there is nothing God cannot do, thus he must be everywhere at once and do everything at once. If that is the case, then Spinoza's take that God is impartial is surprisingly suitable. If he has to do everything at once, then he is essentially existence itself, eh?
Anyway. Spinoza's God would be against prayer, since the nature of prayer is to appeal to God in order to have something change about the universe. Spinoza's God (shortened to S-God) would not ever actually answer prayer, since it is against his nature. A human's purpose in life, rather than be God's slave or servant or minion, would be to study the way the universe works in order to understand S-God. Anything else would be extremely narcissistic, and somewhat humorous to Spinoza.
Spinoza's odd reformation of religion would be inspired by the Stoics of ancient Greece and Rome. These people believed that instead of protesting the way a system works (which is largely futile) one must do their utmost to understand it. In doing so, one understands the necessity of the system, and can make the most of an unchangeable situation. While this depressing situation counters everything we've been conditioned to do (mostly by the church. See? SEE?) it rings with truth. Remember Hobbes, who said that having a bad system is better than no system at all? The stoicist way is very akin to this. Goodness, everything is making sense now!
Anyway, Seneca, one of the stoics, would compare people in society to a dog on a leash. The leash tethers the dog to the person in much the same way that we are bound to necessity and truth, and the more one pulls against the leash, the more one is strangled and the more they suffer. The dog that goes close to the human has the most freedom and is thereby the happiest, which is the state of being that a person should seek in their own lives.
Spinoza's way of studying God also contrasts traditional teachings. Western religion preaches that in order to study God, one studies the Bible or Torah or Qur'an. However, Spinoza recognized that these holy texts were written by uppity men, that didn't know God from atom and were just putting down imagined stories of an imagined being.
In response, Spinoza claimed that by studying nature, one comes to know God. This actually rings very true to Taoism, which proclaims that in studying nature, one reaches the Tao or the Way, since nature is perfect on its own while we are not.
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