Religion, from being something like the sky, from which no man can escape and which contains all that is above the earth, became something like a bank of clouds, a large but limited and changing feature of the human firmament. Of all the ideological changes this is by far the most profound, though its practical consequences were more ambiguous and undetermined than was then supposed. At all events, it is the most unprecedented.
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About Eric Hobsbawm
Eric Hobsbawm was a 20th-century British academic historian and marxist historiographer. Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm was a British historian of the rise of industrial capitalism, socialism and nationalism. His best-known works include his tetralogy about what he called the "long 19th century" and the "short 20th century", and an edited volume that introduced the influential idea of "invented traditions". Read more on Wikipedia →