Just to be clear, many religions and religious viewpoints would vehemently disagree with you.
The idea that all religions lead to the same place is really just one variety of religious belief. There are many others.
Reading the Tao Te Ching is great, but I'm not sure it's going to give you much insight into what Roman Catholics or Sunni Muslims are speaking of when they talk about divinity, god, and religion.
A Hindu might believe they're on a path that leads to reincarnation, a Muslim might believe they're on a path that leads to heaven or hell. At the end of their path though, necessarily something real is going to happen. Whatever their different paths are, that real thing is going to be the same thing for all of us.
The Tao Te Ching might not teach the specifics of what Catholics are speaking of but it might teach what they are trying to achieve in describing their path and what they think lies at the end of it, and how that might be abstracted over many religions in a common attempt at achieving peace, stability and purpose in civilisations.
If you Are extremely analytical, maybe when someone says “God”, do a text replace with “the laws of physics and the initial conditions of the universe”. If what the other person is saying still makes sense, then they aren’t a sky daddy believer.
The universe doesn’t want or command, but it certainly does require and allow.
You share an incredibly tight light cone with all things on earth, living and non-living, so you can assume that your causal relationships with everything and everyone around you are highly intertwined.
Instead of asking "What attracts you to this idea?", I want to ask: "What made you think it was true?"
As the original poster said, what clicked wasn’t some cosmic sense of religious belonging, just wtf people might be talking about when religious gobbledygook falls out of their mouth.
I also like The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and A Christmas Carol and We Should All Be Feminists but I don’t know that I “believe” in these stories so much as they are moving and change my outlook.
(The story is that Lao Tzu (which just means "wise old man") was leaving the city never to return and a gate guard stopped him and begged him to leave behind some written wisdom. The result is the Tao Te Ching.)
For example:
Every victory is a funeral for kin.
Or again, the passage on leaders:
With the best kind of leader
When the work is finished
The people all say
"We did it ourselves."
And the whole book is like that. Chapter after chapter, the most intense wisdom condensed into the most evocative and inspiring verse.
- - - -
In re: thinking it's true, Like I said above, it's not describing propositions that may or may not be true, like a philosophy or a religion. There's no story in it to believe or disbelieve. There is nothing like "God is Love" or "The Force is 42". There is no "Sky Daddy" in it. It's almost like a manual in Logic, like something Smullyan would write. E.g. "The Tao that can be talked about is not the real Tao." is straight outta Gödel, eh?
No go live it.
I posit that my made-up nonsense rebuttal has as much merit as anything else in this thread.
If the fool didn't laugh at it
It wouldn't be the TaoIt doesn't matter one bit to the things/ideas whether we believe in them or not. It matters to us what we believe in.
The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
We don't know what it is, it is only experiential. Some call it Tao, some call it God, some ... Energy. Some work against it, some work with it in a non-striving way.
When you think about it, energy underpins every single process in the universe, yet we do not know what it is or whence it came, only it's effects and transformation.
Most older religions held the "many paths" view, including Judaism. You don't get sky daddy until the Romans needed a new imperial state religion and started mixing personal cults with monotheist cults.
Given that a large fraction of people who self-identify as religious would vigorously disagree with this, I think this insight's of limited—though perhaps not no—utility in understanding religion.
. o O ( Somehow the wording of that thought makes me want to re-read Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid )