U.s. Founding fathers

[Thorne]

People that are moral from their own compass are way to far and few between.

I disagree. It's only that those without a moral compass make the headlines more often. Most people are willing, and able, to maintain a moral center regarding their fellow human beings, even without religion.

Many of those "fireside stories" are expressions of humanities collective wisdom.

Only such wisdom which was collected before about 100AD (give or take), at least as regards the Bible. A few extra years for other books. But you have to realize, too, that much of that "collected wisdom" was taken from relatively small areas of the world, not from a collective humanity. It's more the collected stories of an individual culture, and a culture that is historically obsolete.