Gods and rulers
<...We are used to the claim of practically every army that God is on its side. The Book of J raises the suspicion that God may have been invented for just that purpose.
I would go farther and would venture a guess that a vast majority of mankind's gods have been invented to justify not only wars, but much of man's inhumanity to man, and not incidentally, to justify power being concentrated in a favored few. This symbiotic mutual support relationship between the supernatural and real-world tyranny was described quite well by Ayn Rand in her famous "Attila/Witch Doctor" analogies.