“One thing only is needful: the knowledge of the simple and clear truth which finds place in every soul that is not stupefied by religious and scientific superstitions—the truth that for our life one law is valid—the law of love [seen in the sense of things like the laws of physics], which brings the highest happiness to every individual as well as to all mankind. Free your minds from those overgrown, mountainous imbecilities which hinder your recognition of it, and at once the truth will emerge from amid the pseudo-religious nonsense that has been smothering it.” - Leo Tolstoy, A Letter to a Hindu, December of 1908 (roughly two years before his death): https://www.gutenberg.org/files/7176/7176-h/7176-h.htm

“I was listening to an illiterate peasant pilgrim talking about God, about faith, about life, about salvation, and knowledge of the truth was revealed to me. I became close to the people as I listened to his views on life and faith, and more and more I came to understand the truth. The same happened to me during a reading of Chetyi-Minei and the Prologues (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Menaion_Reader); this became my favorite reading. Apart from miracles, which I regarded as fables to express thoughts, this reading revealed to me the meaning of life.” - Leo Tolstoy, Confession, Chapter Fourteen

To Tolstoy, knowledge is knowledge no matter its source and no matter what we’ve rendered it ever since its been revealed and labeled. He ultimately believed that a more objective interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount - Matt 5-7 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+5&version=ESV) and its precepts, including to “not take an oath at all” (promising to believe things as unquestionably true would be an example of an oath), holds the potential of becoming a kind of constitution for our conscience so to speak—for our hearts, as a species; but without the power or authority aspect.

There’s believing in a God, and then there’s religion. A religion isn’t necessary to hold the belief in the idea of an unimaginable God(s) or creator(s) of some kind—in fact, it was science that led me back to the idea of a God(s), after 15ish years of the Sahara that is atheism (https://lemmy.world/post/25969548), one that wants you to do good, even suffer for it, if one’s willing; not only for the sake of yourself, ultimately—in this life, but especially for the sake of everything else. By good, I mean doing things to others that you would want done to you. Would you want to be considered an “abomination” for being sexually attracted to the opposite sex? Of course not. How would you feel if a bunch of men or women told you, you couldn’t do something because of your sex? Case closed.

The Unnecessary Seperation of Our Knowledge of Morality

"And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins.” - Mark 2:22

What would be the “wineskin” we use to hold the wine of the knowledge of everything we’ve ever presently known as a species? Observation. If we look at our world around us, we can plainly see a collection of capable, conscious beings on a planet, presently holding the most potential to not only imagine selflessness to the extent we can, but act upon this imagining, and the extent we can apply it to our environment, in contrast to anything—as far as we know—that’s ever existed; God or not.

What would happen if the wine of our knowledge of morality was no longer kept separate from the skin we use to hold our knowledge of everything else: observation, and poured purely from the perspective of this skin? Opposed to poured into the one that it’s always been poured into, and that kept it separate at all in the first place: a religion. There’s so much logic within religion that’s not being seen as such because of the appearance it’s given when it’s taught and advocated, being an entire concept on what exactly life is, and what the influences of a God or afterlife consist of exactly, our failure to make them credible enough only potentially drawing people away from the value of the extremes of our sense of selflessness—even the relevance of the idea of an unimaginable God(s) or creator(s) of some kind; only stigmatizing it in some way or another in the process. - https://lemmy.world/post/28917416