Here's how it all got started if you want the real no-bullshit history of religion.
http://anti-dialectics.co.uk/Rest_of_Su ... Twelve.htm
"It was now expedient for theorists to transform the earlier personified powers of the 'gods' into impersonal 'forces' and 'laws' in order to provide a more relevant and persuasive rationale for these new forms of class domination (wherein kings and queens no longer ruled, these having been replaced by oligarchies, dictatorships, or early forms of republican government). Warring, envious and capricious gods (which in effect helped rationalise the interpersonal rivalries between warring royal families) had to be tamed and transformed into the aforementioned impersonal forces, principles and laws. Even so, where necessary the latter were still under the control either of a single Supreme 'Deity', or a Supreme Rational Principle, an Absolute. Naturally, a properly ordered Polis had to reflect a similarly 'rational' cosmic order."
"Superstitious individuals had earlier tried to interpret natural processes as the work of various assorted 'spirits' or 'deities', using anthropomorphic language to that end. Subsequently, in more developed class societies, priests and theologians indulged in these thought-forms for ideological reasons, in order to suggest that the natural and social order are 'divinely-ordained', the legitimacy of which not only couldn't, it shouldn't be questioned, let alone resisted. Subsequently, as we can see from the record, Ancient Greek Thinkers began looking for increasingly secular ways of theorising about the world in order to construct a less animistic rationale for the new forms of class society beginning to emerge in the 6th century BC. However, they also retained use of this transformed language, not noticing they had in fact banished the aforementioned 'spirits' and 'gods' in name alone (as Feuerbach half recognised), but the anthropomorphic connotations still lingered on, and there they remain to this day."
"In that case, Traditional Theorists would start to see reality as not simply 'rational', but as ultimately linguistic, constituted by the word of some 'god', or other. In ancient creation myths, the 'Deity' spoke and everything not only popped into existence, it sprang to attention and thereafter always did as it was told. On this view, seemingly inert matter had the capacity to obey orders (but only when addressed with the right sort of language -- hence, once again, the search initiated by generations of sorcerers for these magical words), as if matter was intelligent and possessed of a will of its own. Nature thus came to be viewed as an enchanted 'Being', with 'secrets' hidden 'beneath the surface', and because of the distorted view of language that underpinned it, this 'Being' could be recruited to the 'legitimation' and 'rationalisation' of class power."