In his book A Confession (1884), Leo Tolstoy wrote about his midlife path from atheism to the acceptance of the main tenets of the Russian Orthodox faith. Tolstoy came to God at around the age of 50, when he started to seriously question the meaning of his life and the prospect of his own mortality.  This is a common theme in the human experience.  Although his many-year struggle with these questions makes for interesting reading, as he was an educated man as the 19th century was winding down, the most relevant aspect now is the mindset of the trendy self-centered artsy upper class that he inhabited in tsarist Russia, for it doesn't take much imagination to see its similarity today.   Tolstoy wrote that as a young man, what guided his life, apart from animal instincts, was a faith in self-perfection.  This legitimate desire to improve himself, for him, quickly morphed into an obsession not to be better in...(Read Full Post)