No, research the trajectory/history of religion in America and American politics. When the US was founded, Thomas Paine was popular for the Age of Reason. Mark Twain, one of the most popular public speakers ever in America was extremely critical of religious ignorance as were many others like Ingersoll. Bet you never even heard of any of this and just believe what you were told at church https://theamericanscholar.org/a-new-birth-of-reason/

Church attendance dropped off in America like a falling rock in the 20's and 30's.

Here is Cynthia Lynn Lyerly, Department of History,Boston College, take on the matter (link at bottom)

In the wake of the Scopes monkey trial, Bryan is made to look foolish. ... Unlike the movie suggests, he's not destroyed, and he's going to continue on. There's no reason to believe, if he hadn't died, that he wouldn't have been a defender of the faith. And probably if he had been able to speechify on it, he would have probably made up for the lost capital of this trial.

Darrow is made to look like a champion of free speech and free thought, like he is.

Fundamentalists retreat. Not that those laws against evolution go away entirely, but fundamentalists retreat from public life, set up their own institutions. They become a little insular. ... They work on building their own internal empire, their own publishing arms, their own radio stations, later their own TV stations. ... We don't see them again until the Moral Majority. So fundamentalism takes a public knock. ...

How do you interpret the Scopes trial? Is it about Darwin and evolution, or something else?

The Scopes trial is about a lot of things. On a religious level, it really is about skepticism, fundamentalism and modernism all together thrown in there, that mix. It's also about cosmopolitanism versus rural America.

The Scopes trial, in Mencken's coverage of it, posits these two different Americas. One is backward and ignorant and rural, and the other is forward-thinking, secular and urban. I think that opposition stays with people for a long time after the trial. ...

What does the Scopes trial tell us about the divisions among Protestants? What are the divisions that we're seeing among religious people?

... There are two very diametrically opposed camps. Just like with the slavery question, they read the same book; they believe in the same God; they believe in the same Christ. But they are fundamentally at odds over basic questions of faith, so Protestants themselves are fractured.

Does anyone end up on top at this moment in 1925, or is it more about division?

... I don't think that these divisions are healed until the 1950s, when, because of the Cold War, you get this idea that America is a religious nation, and so Protestant, Catholic, Jew, whatever you are, that we're people of faith. The Communists don't have faith. ...

Where are we with the notion that America has a special destiny and is chosen by God by the end of the Scopes trial?

What you would have to conclude by the end of the Scopes trial is that no matter where you fall on the spectrum of faith in this time period, that you can no longer be so confident in America's special relationship with God. The feeling that religious people would be that, that's imperiled because of these divisions even between these religious groups. How can God still have chosen America as favored if we don't even agree with each other, with like-minded people of faith?

And then if you're Bryan, you're thinking, America is turning its back on God. It was chosen by God for this special mission, and now America has rejected God, certainly in the public schools. Even though he wins, he loses. He loses in the public relations. He loses in the hearts and minds of most Americans. ...

http://www.pbs.org/godinamerica/interviews/cynthia-lyerly.html#ingersoll

chosenites

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBjdIl-UBhU

No, research the trajectory of religion in America and American politics. When the US was founded, Thomas Paine was popular for the Age of Reason. Mark Twain, one of the most popular public speakers ever in America was extremely critical of religious ignorance as were many others like Ingersoll. Bet you never even heard of any of this and just believe what you were told at church https://theamericanscholar.org/a-new-birth-of-reason/

The majority of the founders were pretty adamant that it would be dangerous to not have a secular form of government.

No, "people" in America have largely doubted that the Bible could be taken literally, at least until evangelical and charismatic religion escaped the rural backwaters and invaded the cities starting in the time of Billy Graham, White House favorite. Harry Trueman for example and those of his time did not invite the snake charmers to the White House.

Looking back on the extraordinary decline in religious literalism that took place among educated Americans in the decades bracketing the turn of the century, it is easy to see why fundamentalism was prematurely declared dead by many prominent American intellectuals in the 1920s, just as the death of God would be prematurely reported in the 1960s. In 1931, the distinguished editor of Harper’s magazine, Frederick Lewis Allen, summed up the Scopes trial in his classic work of popular history, Only Yesterday, which has never been out of print. “Legislators might go on passing anti-evolution laws,” Allen wrote, “and in the hinterlands the pious might still keep their religion locked in a science-proof compartment of their minds; but civilized opinion everywhere had regarded the Dayton trial with amazement and amusement, and the slow drift away from Fundamentalist certainty continued.” That is how things looked at the beginning of the Great Depression in the offices of prestigious magazines in New York and Boston, and that is how they would continue to look to secular intellectuals well into the 1980s.

https://theamericanscholar.org/a-new-birth-of-reason/#

from what you were told, or have you seen evidence?

No, if there really was a god, then all bets would be off because he would have to be a psychopath.

...a God who could make good children as easily as bad ones, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice, and invented hell--mouths mercy, and invented hell--mouths Golden Rules and foregiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people, and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites his poor abused slave to worship him!

Mark Twain

It obvious that this narrative/worldview has some appeal, look at the upvotes your comment evokes.

But, no, I am not falling for it. That is not what is actually going on at all. Its a belief system, effectively a mental virus of make believe. Just because it apparently explains some stuff does not make it valid, does not mean that it accurately describes what is going on. And its based on assumptions that are counter-factual, fake.

The facts do line up to there being factions with power and factions that are oppressed, sure. The ones with more power obviously are in a position to do more damage to others.

But this reliance on particular interpretations of mythological literature, whether its one side or the other trying to twist their version of it, is nonsense. The problem is that despite the scientific method, modern secular beliefs are also a pile of shit. So people desperate for explanations are suckers.

I suggest to you and all others desperate for truth to develop a list of mentors and experts that are an alternative to the bs factions of believers, who have a better researched view of the past and the present, people like: STEPHEN F. COHEN, JON COLE, DAVID CHANDLER, DANIELE GANSER, SHARYL ATTKISSON, MARK CRISPIN MILLER, KEVIN RYAN, DAVID RAY GRIFFIN, F. WILLIAM ENGDAHL ,PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS, FRANCIS RICHARD CONOLLY, PETER DALE SCOTT, PEPE ESCOBAR, ANDREW J. BACEVICH, JOHN JUDGE (1948-2014), JOHN PILGER, AND DOZENS MORE. MARK AMES (BORN OCTOBER 3, 1965) IS A WRITER KNOWN FOR HIS WORK AS A MOSCOW-BASED EXPATRIATE AMERICAN JOURNALIST. ABBY MARTIN. MARK BLYTH, NIALL FERGUSON, BILL MOYERS, STEPHEN KINZER, ROBERT PARRY AND MIKE LOFGREN. DENNIS KUCINICH, JULIAN ASSANGE. WILLIAM BLUM. WILLIAM EDWARD BINNEY Fired FAU professor James Tracy, Craig Murray, DR. MARK SKIDMORE There are more.

If you want someone who has their own "channel" try Sibel Edmonds, Corbett Report, even Jimmy Dore (who landed a gob of spit on Alex Jones’ face).

I think the remedy for ignorant belief is to develop better information sources and wean yourself away from charlatans. Obviously you have some sketchy resources for your information that need debunking.

Don't you know about how these religious beliefs are made up all the time, didn't you laugh at South Park when they made fun of the Mormons, and you certainly can't accept two or three different versions simultaneously like the Muslim version, the Jewish version and the modern post Moral Majority Jerry Falwell and other revisionist apocalyptic versions (Jim Jones anyone?) that didn't even exist in their present form just a few centuries ago. These cult like brainwashing systems are not compatible, except in the most generous interpretations by mythologists like Joseph Campbell or Carl Jung, whom I doubt you have seriously investigated. Did you even bother to look at the links I have provided within the comment section of the post? Here they are again for your information and hopefully, your "enlightenment". You can spend a lifetime growing your understanding if you don't get hung up along the way with bad sources.

https://theamericanscholar.org/a-new-birth-of-reason/

http://www.pbs.org/godinamerica/interviews/cynthia-lyerly.html#ingersoll

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBjdIl-UBhU

I am not saying that the world is unintelligent, or that life in an accident. I am just saying there are excellent resources that expose how these religious cults grew out of ignorance. In order for us to communicate, we have can't just promote opinions. We all have the right to opinions, but we don't have the right to make up facts.

a)literacy, degree of being informed, or some kind of equivalence in educational status. This no longer exists. Educational institutions used to provide this and still do, to a degree, at least provide a fairly uniform world view to the particular elites who attend certain institutions. But the value of the average college degree in terms of real literacy is less than what a standard high school education would give an affluent person 100 years ago.

b)reasonable. a basic common sense, or better yet, an open mind and ability to analyze and assimilate information critically and not be part of a cult like identity group that is absolutist or fanatical about its beliefs. This is rare in extremely religious or extremely partisan ideologues.

c)good faith. not all reasonable people are acting in good faith. good faith goes beyond reasonable in that previous history of (often legitimate) distrust does not apply. Old patterns of distrust are set aside, which is often impossible in the real world. e)subconscious factors - Carl Jung and others have pointed out many psychological features that operate outside of our normal awareness, that affect our dreams and determine our personalities. People who are out of touch with their deepest (not sentimentality) feelings have an advantage in sensing their way through the world without imbalance reliance on mental models, thought systems, world views.

f)degree of indoctrination, conceptually compromised. in general humans have adopted a conceptual framework which they look through and its actually pretty rare for them to look directly at the world without that system of interpretation. At least that is the focus, and becomes extreme with religious and political zealots. Body language shows that there is a level at which a more basic awareness operates and is generally not controlled by our thinking. Thus the thinking level is somewhat superficial or even hallucinatory, but below it is a level that is much more connected to the subconscious, and also the basic physiological functions.

There are excellent resources that expose how these religious cults grew out of a particular literary genre, its actually very well documented. You should be interested in that. Otherwise, you might be putting your faith in something not worthy of it.

Start with Dr. Robert M. Price books and youtubes. There are lots of others but he is a good start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1pCUfaZFCk