Hey Pakistan stop being dicks!

[Mister Agenda]

YES IT DOES

Please take this into evolutionary context.

Please take this into historical context. Who divided up the Middle East to suit themselves? Who installed the Shah of Iran? Who put Saddam in power? Who backed the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan? Who was still supplying pro-Islamist children's schoolbooks to Afghanistan into the nineties? Who props up the Wahabbist Saudi government with their military? Who deposed Saddam and the Baathist party and drove (literally) a million Sunni Baathists out of Iraq (and largely into Syria)? Guess where a lot of them are now.

If Islam had never been concocted, the dominant religion of the region would most likely be Orthodox Christianity, and we would most likely have at least 90% of the same problems with the poor countries in the area which the West has exploited for resources and played like chess pieces for more than a century.

Holy books are weapons, and the people that read them and justify their morality from them run governments and make laws.

Yes, sure they are, and sure they do. If you think it matters much which supposedly holy book it is, or that without one those same people wouldn't be able to come up with justifications to get the populations of their countries to go along with their ambitions, you underestimate the ideology-generating prowess of human beings who want what other people have.

The number one most effective way to reduce the religiosity of a people is to make them educated, prosperous, and secure. Give them that, and they'll mostly disentangle their government from religion over a few decades.

Make them ignorant, impoverished, and desperate (which could easily be mistaken for our goal in the Middle East) and you'll get the opposite. An Enlightenment requires a modicum of peace and security that I don't think can really be imposed from outside, though war is not at all hard to come by from outside.