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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: September 26th, 2024

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  • Absolutely, my pleasure.

    From what I understand, Tolstoy believed that a more philosophical, objective, non supernatural interpretation of the Gospels but especially of the Sermon On the Mount specifically (Matt 5-6: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+5&version=ESV) and its precepts, including to never take an oath at all (including promising to consider anything as infalliable), holds the potential in becoming a kind of constitution for our conscience so to speak, for our hearts, as a species. By constitution I mean something we can gather around and consider a common understanding of how we should be striving to live, something to unite us as a species and make us stronger the same way a constitution does for a nation and did regarding how weak the colonies here in America were back when we didn’t have a constitution to unify us; it only divided us and made us weak and vulnerable.

    I’m not 100% on this next bit, but based on reading his non-fiction it sounds like he didn’t believe Jesus was the Messiah (savior) in the traditional sense—the Nicene Creed interpretation. I believe Tolstoy believed that Jesus, amongst all the humans that existed both before and after him, was the one that taught and suffered to transfer the knowledge of love so well (not perfectly; if Jesus was God he would’ve done it so perfectly to the point where it would’ve easily have done its job by now) that he considered Jesus to be the bee—amongst all those that came before and after him—that stirred (inspired) the hive (humans) so well that ultimately, one could argue that Jesus saved mankind from its inherency to itself: selfishness, being absent the knowledge of his teaching otherwise—the value and potential of selflessness; Messiah is defined as a savior of a people.

    Little do the majority know that they’ve only smothered (yet again, like the Pharisees and Sadducees did in Jesus’ time) the “Law and the Prophets” as a whole: “Love your neighbor as yourself,” by all our (again, yet again) incessant, blind oath taking to our contemporaries. To the point where the precepts—born out of the logic of the “Law and the Prophets” as a whole—of the Sermon On the Mount (selflessness) are the last thing people are met with (in favor of the Nicene Creed, of things Jesus never spoke of or even hinted at when he mimicked Moses, bringing down new commandments during the most public point of his ministry, thus, the most accurate) or are taught when they go to Church or are taught of Jesus today, in favor of securing our or ones place in Heaven (selfishness).