The Theistic Priming of Oligarchy
Why theocracy is inescapable
Euhemerism and astrotheology are both strange hypotheses about the origin of our belief in gods. Both say that the gods are real, but that the gods aren’t what we presume they are.
The one idea is that the gods were originally just heroic or powerful humans and that their exploits were blown out of proportion in the retelling until their legends passed into myths. The other idea is that the gods were really extraterrestrials that landed on our planet and made contact with people, and again their deeds were misinterpreted over time.
The reason these explanations seem strange is that they take religious beliefs too seriously and startle us with the suggestion that such beliefs might be true in any concrete sense, since the theistic beliefs are treasured because they’re crazy.
There’s a third, more political and likely scenario, though, which is that the belief in supernatural gods is meant to prime our effective worship of godlike people, namely of the kings, dictators, and plutocrats that have been propped up as rulers of the world since the first civilizations.
