I think worship is highly exaggerated because at some point religion adopted this word and it has since stayed in a religious context the same way that the word gay originally meant "happy" and now has been adopted to mean homosexual, pretty much exclusively.
In the bible it is clear that the kings of Israel were given "worship".
When you google "worship definition" you have to click the down arrow in order to get the non religious definitions. But there is where you see the uncorrupted version of how the word was used in the past.
So what do I think? I think worship was simply the honor and respect we gave to powerful people in society. Even the term "god", in Hebrew, "El" or "elohim", can be used in reference to powerful men. Kings and judges were powerful men and thus "gods". It's just that in English, the word "gods" is always assumed in the religious context.
but yet again... if you google the word "god definition" and click the downward arrow you'll see that one of the definitions is an object of worship or an influential person.
things tend to evolve though and this is how some powerful people, over time, as their stories were told and retold, became gods; ie. ancestor worship.
What we often do is take things out of context by applying a religious construct that simply assumes divinity in the formal sense of the word. So the more we try to force Haile Selassie into a biblical-religious context, the more I think there will be confusion.
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