These were gods whose worshippers saw them as universal rulers, just as the empires that worshipped them claimed to rule over the known world. All the major world religions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as the religious traditions of Rome and Greece, of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism, and the religious traditions of American empires, incorporated superhuman gods. And for the most part, rulers and the leaders of institutionalized religious traditions worked closely together because they understood how powerful religious beliefs could be as a way of generating
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