Ray Bradbury said it best: "We're living in a science fiction world."

You want examples? Okay; imagine a world in which a particular cult had once controlled all culture, politics and scholarship, everywhere. Imagine this cult's temporal power gradually dwindling, in part because of internal decay (i.e., schisms, etc) and in part because of external developments (i.e., the rise of political movements opposed to this religion, etc). Imagine a heretical cabal of this cult's final few adherents banding together for the sole purpose of restoring their cult to its former position of absolute dominance, and using every scrap of monetary and political power they can get their hands on to do just that.

Sounds like a novel Mack Reynolds, Robert A. Heinlein, or Frank Herbert could have written, doesn't it? Sadly, it's not. Rather, it's happening right now, in the United States. Perhaps you've heard of an alleged 'scientific theory' called Intelligent Design..? ID is, of course, merely fancied-up religious apologetics and the latest incarnation of Creationism. While science is perfectly happy to address questions of design (see also: archaeology and forensics, among other fields), ID can never be science as long as its core axiom can be accurately stated as "somehow, somewhere, somewhen, somebody intelligent did something".

But I digress.