"We can see Eliot’s quarrel with Russell as a foretaste of modernity’s long problem with the Enlightenment. Selected outtakes and my notes on them (my original copy, with those notes was lost to a fire in 2013): I've outgrown Russell, as would be expected four decades later, but it is fair to say he had some influence on my deconversion. Still, the first two did have an impact on me. Russell's arguments in this collection of essays, speeches and debates, while applicable to religion in general, were still focused on his experiences with Christianity (a couple of its versions). although I had direct experience with a few flavors of it (grew up Catholic until around age 13, then American Baptist - the nice kind, not the brimstone version - until about age 18 when the lack of answers to my questions finally pushed me over to the reason side). At that time, those 40 years ago, I was in the same trap as Russell I only knew of one religion. I recently read Evan Thompson's Why I Am Not a Buddhist and recalling that 40ish years ago I had only read the first two essays of this, I decided to read it in parallel, all of it, this time.
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