“Mark and Bev Tindall” <> wrote in message news:<>… From Leo Tolstoy – “A Confession and other religious writings” (Trans: Jane Kentish; Penguin; London 1987)

p. 57 – 58 I was not so much alienated by the fact that in expounding their religious beliefs they confused Christian truths that had always been close to me with much that was unnecessary and irrational. It was more the fact that the lives of these people were just like my own, with the only difference that they did not live according to the principles expounded in their teaching. … they lived only to satisfy their desires and they lived just as badly as, if not worse than, non-believers.

p. 63 Despite the fact that I was utterly convinced of the impossibility of proving the existence of a God (Kant had shown me this and I had fully understood that it cannot be proven), I nevertheless searched for God in the hope that i might find Him, and reverting to an old habit of prayer, I prayed to Him whom I sought but could not find.

p. 65 To know God and to live are one and the same thing. God is life. ‘Live in search of God and there will be no life without God.’

p. 74-75 … I saw that the Orthodox Church regarded as heretics all those who did not profess an identical faith to theirs, just as the Catholics and the others consider the Orthodox followers to be heretics. … I was struck by the fact that theology was destroying the thing it should be advancing. … the contemptuous, self-righteous, invincible maner in which the Catholics behave towards the Orthodox and the Protestants, and the Orthodox towards the Catholics and Protestants, and the Protestants towards them both.

p. 77-78 … in the people’s faith there was falsehood mixed with the truth. … I have no doubrt that there is truth in the teachings, but I also have no doubt that there is falsehood in them too, and I must discover what is true and what is false and separarate one from the other. That is what I have set out to do.

p. 93 Whenever any religious teaching has started becoming distorted its guardians, having already brought the people to a state of weakened rational activity, have then employed every means of persuading them of what they wanted. In all faiths it has been necessary to to persuade them of the same three tenets which lie at the basis of all the perversions that have corrupted ageing religions. Firstly that there are special people who alone can act as intermediaries between man and God, or the Gods; secondly, that miracles have been, and are being, performed which prove and confirm the word of truth of what the intermediaries say; and thirdly that there are certain words repeated orally or written in books which express the unwavering will of God, or the Gods, and which are sacred and infallible. As sson as these propositions are accepted, under hypnotic influence, everything said by these intermediaries is recognized as the holy truth, and the chief purpose of he religious perversion is acomplished.

p. 98 – 99 Faith is man’s conscious relationship with the infinite universe, from which he derives guidance for his activity. And because genuine faith is never irrational, or incompatible with existing knowledge, its characteristics can be neither supernatural nor senseless. … Not only do people today not have this faith, but they do not even know what it is, and what they take to be faith is either an oral repetition of what hey are given as the essence of faith, or the fulfilment of ceremonies which, Church Christinity teaches, will help them to achieve their desires.