He also writes this, in the chapter, "Cashing in on Heaven:"
"Ideas can affect history when used by people to define reality and inspire social action. Ideas have an important feedback upon the very conditions that give birth to them. _They acquire material force when they trigger sentiments and galvanize minds._ But adherents of 'philosophical materialism' would argue that ideas do not arise of their own accord as disembodied self-generating entities divorced from human transmission and artifice.
^^^^^^ CB: Parenti here seems to express some of his "Old" Atheism as when Marx says: "The weapon of criticism, to be sure, cannot replace the criticism of weapons; material force must be overthrown by material force, _but theory itself becomes a material force as soon as the masses grip it._ Theory is capable of gripping the masses when it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem when it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp things by the root. But for man, the root is man himself. The clear proof of the radicalism of German theory, and hence of its practical energy, is that it issues from the decisive, positive suspension of religion. The criticism of religion ends with the doctrine that man is the highest being for man, hence with the categorical imperative to overthrow all conditions in which man is a degraded, enslaved, abandoned, contemptible being ... "