History of Religion

Exactly! The sun doesn't need to be supernatural to be worshipped - even when natural, it's pretty super.

Wait. Almost? ʕ ͡° ʖ̯ ͡°ʔ

Let's bring back sun cults, people!

Is that a reference to Solaire?

I shudder to think what the world would be like without Joe Pesci.

The natural sun exhibits all the basic properties of a loving god, including providing us with a fairly consistent amount of energy to feed all the chlorophyll-based life and keep water mostly liquid. And it commands respect:

• Gaze at ☉ and your eyes will hurt and spot. Gaze for too long and you'll do permanent coronal damage. Stand out in the sun for too long and your skin will burn. Respect the rays.
• Left out in the vacuum of space (exposed directly to ☉) you'll be baked crispy golden brown in minutes. 🜨's atmosphere and magnetic field are essential that we may live on the surface and behold the sky.
• ☉ is 99.8% of the solar system. The remaining .2 is mostly ♃. Imagine getting a blood draw for lab work. That's the solar system compared to ☉. And the whole of 🜨 are a smear on a slide.
• As Carl Sagan points out All of the rocky and metallic material we stand on, the iron in our blood, the calcium in our teeth, the carbon in our genes were produced billions of years ago in the interior of a red giant star. We are made of star-stuff. The ichor of gods runs also through us.
• We depend daily on the consistent energy that shines from ☉. Were it to disappear, we'd quickly freeze and die. (☉ will eventually expand to a red giant about five billion years from now, but that explosion itself will take about a billion years, so it's a process. If the descendants of humankind are still around, hopefully we'll be able to evacuate 🜨 before it gets scorched. But more likely we'll be long gone, lost to another great filter.)
• There are other ways the relationship between 🜨 and ☉ could turn into a global catastrophic risk. A rogue black hole winging the solar system (not even in the ort cloud) could send 🜨 into an eccentric (very eliptical) orbit, giving us scorching summers and sub-arctic winters. And CMEs in the geological record have been massive enough to overwhelm the magnetic field and bake all surface life crispy. But not in over a billion years.
• And yet, ☉ loves us (well, shines on us, providing life-sustaining energy) unconditionally being consistent for eons, shining upon the just and the unjust, the predator and herbivore and parasite without judgement. Or at least ☉ doesn't express its judgement in any way we can detect.

So yeah, ☉ worshipers and heliophiles may pay homage to the sun for the wrong reasons (tanning and spending too long presents cancer risk) but ☉ features a lot of properties we expect from the divine. But that doesn't help religious ministries who want to retain members who doubt their own favor in the eyes of gods, so will come and pray and feed collection plates and sell the dogma to passersby and help upkeep the temple. The sun shines on the crops of the profane as it does the devout.