Celebrity-worship and hero-worship should not be confused. Yet we confuse them every day, and by doing so we come dangerously close to depriving ours… - Daniel J. Boorstin

The theory called Euhemerism argued that all gods may have originally been only human rulers elevated to divinity by later generations for their benefits to mankind.

But illusions die hard, and the brighter they are the longer they take adying.

"For Toynbee, finally, the "higher religions" displaced societies or civilizations as the units that gave meaning to history. While brashly insisting on his naively English empirical reliance on facts, which he amassed in prodigious quantity, still in his personal quest for salvation he had developed his own universal apocalyptic view. His reassurance of universal salvation had wide appeal in an age of two world wars. Scholars have objected less to Toynbee's vague definitions of society and civilization than to his tendency to simplify the study of history into a branch of theodicy-an answer to Job, a science of justifying God's ways to man."