Until there is secular rationalism...
So how do we spread rationality? Education reform, political activism, competition like the other guys says or rebellion like Dank suggests (lol...Dank).
I believe it begins with education; 14 years of education can either produce a thinking, skill-bearing human being, complete with the ability to differ between right and wrong and a clear understanding of the functions of law, or we can produce what's being pumped out now, people with their dreams bloated and souls crushed, with hardly any chance in the job market for having no skill in anything but the liberal arts, which, as we know, doesn't get you far. I believe a school should teach a person not how to do this or how to do that, but teach the person the very tools they need to understand anything and everything; a school should teach a person how to think, not how to listen, for the latter produces a dependency effect where the individual feels they cannot understand anything without first being fed the knowledge by an approved official; this squashes much outside-the-box thinking that we find so commonly with intuitive types.
This begins by taking the state's power to both mandate and control education, for they have a vested interest in keeping healthy minds ignorant of government functions to ensure the state always appears not only wanted, but absolutely vital; it is very rare to find a teenager interested in their government because "politics are stupid and pointless", as I can attest to with my mediocre education. To ensure that an individual's education is not being tampered with, the provider of such education must have no bias, not toward any religion, nation or other governing entity, interested only in producing intelligent human beings.
This is handled perfectly fine by the free market; take, for example, schooling through taxation: if the logic follows that schools can be paid for and regulated by the state, it should also follow that those same schools can be paid for privately, and without state regulation, at a much lower cost. So the idea that, if the state didn't pay for schools there would be no schools, simply doesn't follow for we all agree that if we want schools, and we're willing to pay for them, there's no need for state involvement (at least, not anymore.) This comes with the added effect of education being just that: not indoctrination, not propaganda, but honest, unbiased, beneficial education. This is assuming modern methods of education, such as through the Internet, are not sufficient, which is consistently proving to be false; though I can claim to have become far more capable as a thinker through autodidacticism on the Interwebs, I am curious to see if children are also capable of self-knowledge; I don't believe the assertion that a child must have the knowledge beaten into him, but just the opposite, that children are naturally curious and starving for knowledge and it is that which is stolen through mandatory education.
However, pushing even further back, for this reform to happen, you would need parents who want better for their children than what's currently being provided. So the true start of this whole process is in parenting; there must be a paradigm shift in the way parents view their children and the methods children are raised before any of this can come to fruition. This is why, though we may see the truth, it takes so long for these changes to occur; society can't be changed on a whim, and the ideas some people hold dearly, e.g. "beating your kids is the only way to get them to listen" and "schools have to be funded by the state because anyone who thinks differently hates education", just don't go away very easily. So I agree with you; technology is playing a massive role in this change. The Internet has turned me into an atheist libertarian, and this is a very common trend; there is no school on this planet which will lead a person to this very conclusion about religion and politics, but I see it as the rational end-of-the-line with these two subjects after deciding I would understand the two on my own.
I have a lot of faith riding on the generations being raised with the Internet, where one can find knowledge, the universal good, very easily and efficiently; this is producing the peaceful people we need, despite many violent upbringings, to begin the revolution of parenting, to begin the revolution of education, and thus a global revolution of how we perceive government and the roles it should play in our daily lives. The Internet is bringing us all under one roof, a global community named mankind, and so does Bitcoin and its derivatives unite us under one economic banner. The beginnings of a society are in its people, not its government; the government comes only to represent the people (and though many of us disagree on how much government should govern us, none of us, not even the most ardent followers of the state, agree that it should control our every action i.e. communism and fascism); this means, no amount of political activism will help us if we're ill equipped to even govern ourselves. If there's a fundamental problem with the society, the system will naturally represent these problems; changing the system cannot change the people, only the people can change themselves, and if the system is not working, it is because we have failed at some level, and we cannot blame the men who persuade us with false promises if we're incapable of recognizing them.
The only way to completely stop an idea is in its infancy, and so our only plan of action as of right now is to ensure this technology remain unhindered by any governing body; the pieces will naturally fall into place from here on out; the truth always floats to the top.
Check out this critical analysis of our current educational system and where we're headed:
here
