Frank Herbert's Dune, enhanced in all its glory by Denis Villeneuve's adaption, is a major slam against organized religion. As a lapsed Catholic raised devoutly in the ritualistic tradition of Catholicism, I found the story of Paul Maud'Dib's rise from an awkward teenage ducal heir to a messiah completely fascinating.

I rationalized my way out of believing in an omnipotent God with a resurrected Son during college, grounded by one of my favorite classes, Biological Anthropology. There, we were taught to interpret biological evolution through the cultural evidence buried alongside our forebears.

At some point, we started caring about our dead, no longer leaving bodies haphazardly where they dropped, but burying them and placing objects in the grave with the body. As our minds evolved, evidence of mythological beliefs was found as we attempted to explain the sun and other natural, unexplainable events. This evolution of belief and its contradictory nature in freeing and oppressing its people was apparently all just a setup for the human race to create another messiah 20,000+ years later, except this time through genetic memory and engineering.

Once Paul drinks the Water of Life, he isn't a "spiritual" Messiah fulfilling God's word; he's just a dude who's the result of 10,000 years of genetic manipulation, aided by a natural substance that unlocks time and imparts on those who survive its consumption, prescience. Some higher power didn't cause a ginormous Shia-Hulud sandworm to appear. A Bene Gesserit, many years early, had a vision of the future, and that vision was ed down by oral history. It didn't predict that Jessica and Paul would survive the Water of Life. Jessia and Paul were trained in the Bene Gesserit way of combatting poisons.

Dune is a masterclass in the deconstruction of religious systems and how the power of belief can lead to overwhelming elation, community, and victory, as well as abject terror, hate, and self-destruction.