The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism by Karen Armstrong

 My choices are getting more and more towards books related to religion and history (mostly around wars and colonisation). Its not good because this narrows down the topics to a very limited subjects, and after a point it looks like that the new books are not adding anything to what you've already read.

About this book, this is absolutely amazing and the only thing anyone could have asked for it an updated version. This one stops at 1999 as this was published in 2000.

It largely covers the changes in the three main monotheistic religions, and tries to paint a picture of how the different sects of practitioners and preachers responded to the immediate circumstances. People were led to believe in alternate truth, and how the acts of change between orthodox model to not so successful attempts of modernisation, and then back to fundamentals.

The larger thought is that religious ideas which were conceived long back couldn't respond to the changing environment. It was not able to answer the questions which came up with the rise of science and reason. A lot of things which were taken for granted by these ideologies were challenged in the light of new scientific findings. The problem was that those ideas were more to do with faith/belief rather than the reason, and eventually they were less accommodating to the reason.

This lead to the conflict between mythos and logos. So, this came down to the point where the fundamentalists (this word has nothing to do with the militant connotations attached to it in the modern lingo) wanted to create a society which was present at the ancient times which was a difficult task. The nostalgia (which was not even a first hand experience for anyone) passed over the generations became a mythical world where everything was great, and moral, and anything which suggests otherwise is treated as something suspicious or enemy.

The other big factor was the politics, ego, misguided understanding and greed of a lot of people who had vested interests in how the things came up. It may not have been the first intention but eventually it became so big that it was out of anybody's control.

There have been many points that have been put to the argument of why this became so but there can't be any one reason that can justify it. It is more of a mix of various reasons, circumstances, and choices which led to it.

This is worth a read for the history even if it is not up to date.

Peace