You or I or any of the other six billion (armchair) historians on the planet can sit down and analyse - in great detail - the conflicting interests that give birth to and fuel various conflicts and religious cults. We can then come to the conclusion that it was the underlying social, economic and political movements that caused and fueled the conflict completely independently of religion.
But this is an exceedingly simplistic reasoning that ignores the ability of religion to mobilise people and give them marching orders. There may well need to be an underlying economic, social or political conflict for such a mobilisation to be possible, but to say that those reasons are the be-all-end-all of why Joe Schmoe decides join the revolution or go to war against Eastasia is like saying that nationalistic jingoism had no responsibility for the first world war, because it was ultimately caused by the underlying economic and strategic tensions in early 20th-century Europe, or that Marx and Engels had no hand in the Russian revolution, because it was caused by the inherent instability of the Czarist regime.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
You can't make sense of this by assuming that it's worth debating whether or not the god in question actually exists. And you can't stop a war by arguing that he, she or it doesn't.
In the 20th century arrived Marxism, Nazism and Capitalism borrowed the social dynamics, removed the 'god' part and replaced it with different abstractions. But functionally these are secular religions with very similar social dynamics - mythologised narrative, rituals of hierarchy, an explicit morality reinforced by punishment/reward and narrative repetition, teleology and personality cults.
So - show me an example from history of a religious movement with significant political influence which was dismantled purely by a debate about its its beliefs, with no other political activity.
It doesn't happen. Narratives change because of wars, civil unrest, popular pressure on elites, and occasionally because the elites decide they need a different story to control people's interests and activities.
Narratives don't change because someone writes a book telling people that what they believe is silly.
The point of my original diary is that if you want to change people's minds you have to offer them a more positive and inclusive experience of a different narrative - which is clearly not happening with the atheist-led anti-fundie movement.
