How Ancient Kings & Their False God Screwed Up CleanTech Adoption & Other Climate Efforts Today – CleanTechnica

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Even before 2025, the United States was a bit of a laggard in clean technology adoption (and that’s putting it optimistically).

At all levels, cultural obstacles kept getting in the way, and that has only gotten worse. Even with Democratic Party control of the White House, House of Representatives, and (narrowly) the Senate, getting even semi-serious clean technology funding passed was like pulling teeth. While many people are nervous about trying something new out, there are also many people who are opposed at a cultural and even a religious level to things like EVs, solar panels, and even electric stoves.

To those of us who aren’t big on religion, this all seems like insanity. But there are some big historical and cultural reasons why the more whacked-out conservatives in the United States are the way they are.

To explore this further, I’m going to have to delve into the world of religion, a topic that brings up a lot of bad feelings. If any of this gets you angry, keep in mind that I’m not trying to have a theological debate or tell anyone what they should believe. My goal here is to discuss some history and then discuss how it affects us today.

Please, believe whatever you wish to believe. It’s not my place to tell people what to believe. But, knowing the history that shaped today’s religious landscape in the United States is useful information.

That Time Kings & Rich People Decided Thanos Was Right

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know about The Avengers and all of the other characters in the Marvel movies. If you’re a comic book geek, you probably know more about this stuff than me. Captain America, Iron Man, Ant Man, Thor, Doctor Strange, The Incredible Hulk, and many other somewhat good guys face off against characters like Loki (who later kind of becomes a good guy), Red Skull, Ultron, and Thanos. These are just a few of the many, many superheroes and supervillains.

Thanos, thinking that balance must be brought to an overpopulated universe, successfully defeats the good guys, kills off half of sentient life in the universe, and is only defeated when a team of the good guys goes back in time to stop him and save everyone who was killed. I’d say nobody liked the guy, but there are real-world people saying things like “Thanos was right,” some joking, some not.

The religious world of the ancient near east was a lot like these Marvel stories. Most everyone (including Israelites) believed in multiple gods and goddesses, including Baal, Ashera, El, Yahweh, and several others. There were also second- and third-tier gods and demi-gods, gods that started out on the good guy team and were later moved to the bad guy team, and even mergers where the stories of multiple gods would be combined into one. Different cultures in the region would often copy and rename each other’s gods and make subtle changes to their backstories.

To many Christians and Jewish people today, the process of moving from that messy, dynamic pantheon of gods to one single god is a heroic story. Getting people to stop worshipping false gods, stop making terrible sacrifices, and join the one true religion of Yahweh is seen as a good thing.

Modern biblical scholarship reveals a very different story than appears on the pages of the tail end of the Old Testament. Rather than men commanded by the true god to put down worship of the false gods, a political process was actually behind the decision to suppress polytheism. The rich and the powerful, especially those aligned with Yahweh’s temple, stood to benefit if their god was chosen over others. Also, the god that justified violence (such as the killing off of whole cultures, a global flood, and much more) was a natural choice for monarchs and other lesser warlords of the era who needed to justify their violent ways. Men who wanted greater control over women liked the idea of getting rid of the goddess Asherah.

In other words, people who had axes to grind got together and made sure their axes got sharpened before the wheels were ground down.

In the end, a violent, genocidal, jealous god was adopted as the leader of the national religion. Temples to others were destroyed. People who refused to toe the line were persecuted and killed. Royal scribes went through the old texts and changed things to support the new state religion, and even invented new stories (like the Exodus) to further help the rich and the powerful. Despite claiming to be monotheistic, a new bad guy was even created that didn’t appear in earlier texts, to make sure people had two supernatural entities to fear.

With this, a new precedent was set in what would later become the Judeo-Christian milieu: religious belief could be shaped to reinforce state power and control, and populations would let you get away with it.

Reinventing Jesus Christ To Serve The Empire

For hundreds of years, Christians were persecuted. The idea of a deity or small pantheon of deities that promoted love, peace, turning the other cheek, and helping the poor was again not great for the people in charge.

Despite killing and persecuting those who followed early flavors of Christianity, it wouldn’t go away. So, by the year 313, the emperor decided to use the Microsoft strategy against it: embrace, extend, extinguish. After legalizing the faith and then supporting it, Constantine worked to establish councils to decide what Christians should believe. Then, Emperor Theodosius adopted the new and modified Christianity as the official state religion.

Among changes made to Jesus’ teachings were a number of deletions, changes to support government power, and reinterpretation/burial of criticism Jesus leveled at the bloody violence of Yahweh, and those who use Yahwism to control the population for personal gain.

Instead of calling on people to be better, be peaceful and loving, and seek for better things, religion was twisted to support the rule of emperors and the violence such leaders participate in. The better god of love was replaced with the old god of fear and death that had already proven so convenient.

European Kings Invent The Divine Right To Rule

As most people know, medieval Europe wasn’t a nice place. Warlords, some big and some small, engaged in violent warfare and power grabs on a regular basis. Eventually, the concept of the modern nation-state was invented, and the biggest warlords became kings.

To further solidify their power, these kings took advantage of the Protestant Reformation, which gave some of them the opportunity to form their own state religions. This made them accountable to nobody but themselves, and possibly some of the more powerful “princes” (nobles, lesser warlords who paid taxes to them, etc). The doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings was established, again threatening the people with the violence of Yahweh and the devil if they stepped out of line.

This tradition of using religion and a frightening god to scare people into obedience to the state made its way across the Atlantic with settlers who wanted to get away from Europe’s problems. Some of the colonies and early US states had official religions. Religious justifications were invented for denying women and non-whites rights, including in moral defense of slavery.

Dominionism & The Devaluation Of Life

Just as in ancient times, the rich and the powerful today use a violent and murderous god, pre-packaged for them by previous generations of tyrants, to justify their own inaction, greed, and selfishness, especially when not providing aid to the suffering.

The recent floods in Texas gave us an awful example of this. Instead of discussing a meaningful response, recovery, and future mitigation efforts to prevent future deaths, some religious politicians simply said it was their god’s will. Already comfortable with worshipping a god they believe has committed much greater atrocities, losing a relatively small number of people in floods was well within what he’d do.

And, because it was an “act of god,” there’s no need to prevent future deaths. Just pray and hope he doesn’t kill your family next.

This mindset of normalized mass death is further exacerbated by the concept of dominionism, which uses a Bible verse that supposedly gave human beings power over the earth and every living thing on it, to justify basically doing whatever we want, environmental consequences be damned.

These two beliefs combine into the ultimate excuse for inaction against climate change, dependence on foreign energy, and preparation for future extreme weather. Worse, it often leads to a call to be against such things, because we mere mortals don’t want to get in the way of such a wrathful being.

For people stuck in this worldview, doing things like switching to clean energy, moving away from gas- and diesel-powered vehicles, and cooking on electric stoves is either not something we have any responsibility to do, or worse, something that we shouldn’t do because it might bring the wrath of the heavens down.

Getting Away From This Kind Of Thinking Doesn’t Require Throwing Cherished Beliefs Away

Here’s the thing: not all Christians think this way. Believing in Jesus Christ doesn’t necessarily mean that we must believe in the reinterpretations of Christian or earlier Jewish teachings that were imposed by government officials. If anything, stubbornly sticking to that way of thinking is giving government more power over you.

Christians who don’t believe in justifying the evil things supposedly done by the god of the Bible arrive there in various ways. Some disconnect Jesus and Yahweh. Others blame earthly powers for corrupting the Bible. A few even think that Yahweh and the other Elohim were alien invaders out to enslave humanity, and that Jesus was trying to save us from them. There are multiple paths out, and if you’re thinking of going to better places, you need to find a path that works for you.

Again, I’m not going to tell anyone what they should personally believe (and will not be debating theology in the comments with anybody), but it’s pretty clear from the work of academic Biblical scholars that concepts like Biblical inerrancy and literalism just don’t hold water. Abandoning those falsehoods and rethinking the Bible gives people the opportunity to stop believing in murder, genocide, and rule by fear.

It can also give us a shot at increasing the adoption of clean technology. Instead of seeing clean technology as being against a frightening god’s will, we should instead acknowledge our stewardship that comes with authority over the planet. With our great power as humans comes a responsibility to use that power for the good of the thing we’ve been put in charge of.

Featured image: The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, painting by John Martin, 1852 (Public Domain).