When I read "The Varieties of Religious Experience" around 1969 I couldn't believe half the time what I was reading

And I think if you read this book now it will even be moreso this way because William James actually traveled around the world and observed different religious experiences people were having himself and wrote down what he saw in this book.

And this is before we went through World War I and World war II and the Korean War and the Viet Nam War and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars where war by war the world became more alike and homogenized. HOwever, I think the biggest change was when passenger jet travel went global around 1957 and more and more people traveled the world and saw all this first hand where people all became much more the same and as a result World War III (at least so far) has been averted because more people understood each other and racism became much less than before (at least outwardly) of one nation against another.

In the 1950s people hated each other even in other cities more than now. They hated anyone who was a different kind of Christian than they were then too. They especially hated anyone who was not Christian or who was atheistic or even agnostic here in the U.S. too.

We always talked a good line about Freedom of Religion but it was always mostly not true (at least it wasn't in the 1950s) when I was growing up here in the U.S.