[ElectroBuffoon]

>> ...because humans had become too dependent on them for thinking.

> ... but no. The causes of the Butlerian Jihad are forgotten (or, at least, never mentioned) in any of Frank Herbert's novels; all that's remembered is the outcome.

Per Wikipedia or Goodreads, God Emperor of Dune has "The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines...Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed."

Vague but pointing to dependence on machines as well as some humans being responsible for that situation.

[Radim]

A slight elaboration from the same book, although still frustratingly vague:

"The machines themselves condition the users to employ each other the way they employ machines."

- God Emperor of Dune

[moffkalast]

Human: Go forth and destroy everything!

Machine: Ok.

Human: HOW COULD YOU DO THISSSS

[TeMPOraL]

Human: *remembers "Go forth and multiply!"*

Human: *stares back at God*

[duskwuff]

It's still a little ambiguous - and perhaps deliberately so - whether Leto is describing what inspired the Jihad, or what it became. The series makes it quite clear that the two are often not the same. As Leto continues later in that chapter:

"Throughout our history, the most potent use of words has been to round out some transcendental event, giving that event a place in the accepted chronicles, explaining the event in such a way that ever afterward we can use those words and say: 'This is what it meant.' That's how events get lost in history."