When has religion NOT tried to take over everything?

And, for a while, they were pretty successful. There were kings, but most didn't want to cross the Church.

In much of the world, that has been waning for a couple of centuries. I think it is surviving here longer, ironically, because of the 1st Amendment. We have no state-sponsored religion, deliberately.

I don't regard "freedom of speech" as the culprit. Beliefs are stand-ins for ignorance – deficits of verifiable understanding.

Human evolutionary mechanisms are enormously challenged to accommodate the recent rapidly accelerating evolution of technology that is enabling dramatically expanding influence of social media on scales ranging from local to global. A recent study suggests that a majority of the US population now gets their news from scatter-shot social media rather than respected and at least to some extent disciplined sources.

"The proportion accessing news via social media and video networks in the United States (54%) is sharply up, overtaking both TV news (50%) and news websites/apps (48%) for the first time." So if you were wondering why divisive, angst-inducing, fear-mongering content continues to dominate news cycles, this is probably why.

socialmediatoday.com - Reuters digital news report video consumption trends influencers

Over countless millennia we've evolved from lifelong tribal persuasions to national identities and religious affiliations to globally contagious perspectives via social-media. And now, the emergence of AI is bound to amplify this trend, for better or worse.

Here's a Perplexity.AI response to the prompt "belief versus knowledge" [I hope this link works for others. If not, simply go to Perplexity.AI (Pro) and search for "Belief versus knowledge".]:

perplexity.ai - Belief versus knowledge

The included table labeled Key Distinctions is of particular interest.

Tom