I only listened to a couple of minutes after CLR James quote. BTW James didn't say anything about the French Revolution. That was me carrying on a train of thought.... and yes I am aware it was called a bourgeois revolution. On the other hand you can look back and say it was co-opted ...
I wasn't interested in what was wrong with the atheist movements in the UK or the US. John Searle at UCB was part of that for awhile. John is a good source for intros to standard US philosophy and history of philosophy. He should be good for philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, but unfortunately I hate the standard approachs. They follow the analytic track with Locke, Berkeley, Hume, on up to Russell---the same boring stuff I learned. I must have been good at it because I got A's. But after a point, I just got sick of all the picky crap over language and perception. It was from both common sense and what was already known through biology just wrong. The rest of the track deteriorated into logic and math. I was less good at that and got C's and B's but I got throught it.
When I hit anthro and continental philo, what a fucking relief. Actual human beings walking around and talking. Really rationalism failed because it was boring. I mean I got way into this at some point and realized, hell the universe isn't rational. It's the universe. It has its own gig. Our job is to figure it out and we've tried rational and that sort of works but often doesn't.
Actually I thought the human body had a great story to tell. It's not rational. It's its own gig and really more like a key to the natural world. You get down to molecular biology and it looks like Rube Goldberg took chemistry. The prime directive of Darwin is not natural selection. The prime directive is, whatever works.
So studying that `whatever worked' is a whole lot more interesting than arguing over various human gods. What fascinated me about myth was the creativity. The Egyptians did great art with their pantheon but they didn't have the drama. The Greeks had real knock down drag out arguments. When I finally saw Zeus as the godfather and his family, with his bitchy errant daughter Athena, and mister perfect Apollo...well it was breakthrough. Then there was the family genius kid gone bad, Prometheus---fascinating guy. The trouble with the Egyptians, they didn't have drama.
Compared to those people, what the fuck was that nasty ass Jewish and Christian god about? One giant big jerk. I mean the flood was genocide. Then Moses? The big asshole made him a refugee just for screwing up the first copy at a party. How that guy ever got popular is beyond me. I mean it's a mystery. The only plausible explanation was, he was such an blood thirsty egotistical asshole, that the Romans liked him.
CG