Board Thread:Warhammer 40k General Discussion/@comment-1657156-20130413051827/@comment-173.27.9.54-20131217174725

Suggesting the Emperor started various religions has the obvious negative outlook on the religion but it also makes atheism look rather foolish. "Those miracles weren't caused by God, just by some psychic superbeing." It makes it sounds as though the view doesn't have any real arguments supporting it.

The Emperor being around for all of human history also knocks on our ingenuity. If we ever did anything worthwhile, it's all attributed to the Big E. The following theory attempts to work around this.

Emperor was born in 8th millenium BC as is generally accepted. At about 1000 BC, mankind has had bronze working for a couple thousand years and is beginning on iron. There's a gradual population increase. Overall, nothing much is happening. Big E knows about other races in the galaxy by his psychic powers, so he teleports off for some extended recon.

While spending centuries travelling the stars, he notes the extreme danger of the galaxy. His powers alert him to the Void Dragon attacking Earth, so he returns about AD 1000. After defeating the C'tan, he caches it on Mars so as to keep it from inspiring technology in mankind. (If he had wanted that, he would have locked it under the Himalayas.) At that time, he plans to ensure man's survival by keeping him in a primitive state and hiding him from the horrors of the galaxy. He embarks on a thousand year crusade to eradicate all xenos civilizations in the systems close to Earth, just to be on the safe side. (Notice how in real life we haven't had any alien contacts?)

He returns either now or a couple centuries in the future to find that mankind was a bit cleverer than he expected and has created a thriving industrial civilization. Impressed, the Emperor changes the plan to 'wait and see what mankind comes up with'.