I'm getting into Yet Another Re-Read, and am enjoying it.

RJ succeeded with making the Aelfinn and Eelfinn something other than merely "people in funny suits" which bugs me about the likes of the Dragons of [Autumn/Winter/Spring] trilogy and other series in that wider series, and other fantasy novels. A lot of those sorts of elfin creatures are taken from Tolkien without the writer taking the trouble to find out the behaviour of the elfish/trollish creatures in the myths Tolkien used for his fantasy, which, as I say, they wind up being "people in funny suits". I'm afraid I don't care for "people in funny suits" - once when I was a kid, in the Papua New Guinean bush, and going through some section of the bush that the locals didn't use, I was told by a local who saw me, "Bai masalai i kaikaiim yu!" - the local woodland spirit will eat you! And that guides my reading of everything that involves woodland spirits, house spirits, water spirits, and the like. Of course, Tolkien "baptized" the woodland spirits and made them into "natural Catholics" - it's good that RJ "unbaptized" them, so they are closer to their original style, but the problem I find is that they're "semi-technocrats". I would recommend reading https://www.oocities.org/thslone/masalai.html and likewise https://www.amazon.com/One-Thousand-Papua-Guinean-Nights/dp/0971412715

Actually, if you want references to religion in The Wheel of Time, look at the Darkfriends. And the human equivalent to the Myrdraal, the Whitecloaks. When the Whitecloaks catch some actual Darkfriends in their Citadel of Light, the Darkfriends are reciting a credo and a catechism. And they talk about The Great Day of Return - now what is one of the most "popular" religions in the US at this current moment, with televangelists understandably drawing the mockery of others - remember that 80s movie Pass the Ammo, starring Tim Curry as the hypocritical televangelist whose hand is always out for the poor folk's money? My guess is that RJ saw what was going on when he was demobilized/discharged, with books like The Late Great Planet Earth in circulation, and televangelists raking in the dough while wallowing in their depravity, and it ate at him until he turned it into a story, just to get it out of him, so he could stop thinking about it.