

Perhaps partly, my personal belief is the is traces back to early tribal days. I believe the first cultural leaders likely struggled with retaining control and authority at a certain point. After all, there is only so much you can threaten people with to keep them in like. The worse of which is death. A sufficiently motivated person may not care about their physical well-being if they want to achieve a important enough goal. Create an invisible “soul” and a space wizard that determines if that soul gets bliss or torture after death and it adds a new level of control.
I constantly refer to my parents and in-laws as children. Why? Because they behave exactly like my 11 year old. They have no critical reasoning skills, no emotional intelligence, are easily offended, and can not be reliability left on their own without screwing something up.
At some point around retirement age, humans seem to cognitively revert back to children and those of us in middle adulthood are left to parent our actual children and our childish parents.