I mean yeah, basically, the idea of being the Mahdi and convincing the desert dwelling followers of Mohammad to follow you as a revolutionary army was a big trope for a while, king of the khyber rifles type books were full of it. Dune just rewrites Paul from being actual English aristocracy to being a near identical space facsimile, likewise Bedouin and Muslim stereotypes and tropes common in adventure lit make the Fremen. Big bad is mostly anti German tropes from ww1 era novels; corpulent, perverted, and sneaky.

The great imagination in it comes from taking this fairly standard formula and going totally crazy with sand worms and Duncan clones.

Though when you look at it like this it's obvious liet kynes is actually the linchpin of his creative vision and everything else is formed around that character

He wishes he had that kind of desert power.

I guess, but Moses spent 40 years wandering the desert and he doesn't get shit for it.

Obi-Wan wants a word with you.

I believe it. People like me who grew up in a devout household and are atheists now are the weird ones. I can almost tell by sight at every atheist event I go to. The ones that look like they have seen hell vs the ones that were lucky.

I didn't want to cause a whole thing because I have better things to do with my life than get offended but the last atheist event I went to someone asked me if I was considered introducing my kids to some diet religion type deal for "community" like Methodist or Baha'i or reformed Judaism. It just popped in my head that you might as well ask a homosexual who was forced into conversion therapy to "at least try dating the other gender and see where it goes".

Now again I didn't react the way I secretly wanted to I just told him that I think we are fine but I so wanted to bite his head off. I clawed my way out of that shit and no way anyone is inflicting it on my children.

Growing up I only ever saw church and religion on TV and never really thought much of it. One day as kids my mom pulled my brother and I aside and asked us, "It doesn't really make any sense for there to be a bearded man in the sky, does it?" That's all I really needed to hear to be science-minded for the rest of my life.

I'm a little jealous of people who grew up with church communities though. There's lots of good people out there, even if it's for the wrong reasons.

That makes sense, though there are also people who were brought up in strictly religious households and still came out being agnostic/atheist. It's partially statistics, but I wouldn't describe the process as a strict set of phases.