Dutch Express

50,000 years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plains, and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell. It was a tiger, and the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger, and he ran like hell. But it was only the wind, and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chicken shit. But the third guy, he only thought it was the wind. So he shrugged it off, and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across 10,000 generations. And after a while, everyone was seeing tigers in the grass, even when there weren't any tigers. Because even chicken shits have more kids than corpses do.
And from those humble beginnings, we learned to see faces in the clouds, and portents in the stars. To see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid. Even here, in the twenty-first century, you can make people more honest by scribbling eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now, we're wired to believe unseen things are watching us. And it came to pass that certain people learned to use that. They painted their faces, or they wore funny hats. They shook their rattles and they waved their crosses. They said: "Yes, there are tigers in the grass. There are faces in the sky. And they will be very angry if you do not obey their commandments. You must make offerings to appease them. You must bring grain, and gold, and alter boys for our delectation, or they will strike you down and send you to the awful place." And people believed them by the billions. Because, after all, they could see the invisible tigers.