>>17785264I think it definitely plays a role. My father is an atheist (and so am I) and my grandmother was a Church of Christ type (which is practically Salafism), and his attitude towards religion is very New Atheist tier, although I am not like that in terms of personal animosity towards religious people, but I was raised in a non-religious household and didn't have that experience growing up. I've also been influenced by atheist writers who have had more nuanced views of religion. I don't think religion is going to go away anytime soon BTW, nor would I press a button to eliminate it across the earth if I was given the choice. But if I lived under a religious fundamentalist theocracy then I'm sure that I'd be a raging militant atheist.
I'd add that extreme forms of secularism on large scale are really only viable during times of major revolutions (such as the French and Bolshevik revolutions) against religious opponents who are highly dogmatic, oppressive, and corrupt. Like imagine being ruled by the sleaziest, most corrupt televangelists like Kenneth Copeland, and they also kill people. The secularism of the Kemalist movement in Turkey lies somewhere in between the French/Russian revolutions and the laissez-faire secularism of the United States.
>>17785387Well many of the early Zionists were themselves not religious, and 40% of Israeli Jews are completely non-religious. The Bible for them was a useful myth, and a mythologically-rendered story of where they came from, which they used as part of a nation-building project. And the sort of critical Biblical history where they'd do archaeological digs to see what matched up with the Bible and what didn't became a fascination with these people back in the 50s and 60s. The kind of religious Zionism you see there now, which is mirrored by Islamism and Evangelical Christianity, have developed as time has gone on, and they are essentially secular ideologies which have been re-theologized and dressed up.