And they've ruled it for a very long time.
This doesn't make them right or every religious believer evil. But this needs to be unpacked from different perspectives. Let's start first with the materialist view which espouses that God is nonexistent. If this were true we would have to concede that the cabal is delusional and has been for a very long time although we could forgive their delusion 1000 years ago or 10,000. This view would also explain the sheer contradictoriness of religion whether cross-cultural or internal as they are making it up as they go.
I suggest they are a united front from every culture on earth and they've ruled traditionally via divine right and royal bloodlines. This isn't to say that they have no divisions but they cohere where it matters most: societal power. And let me assure the atheists out there that they do not and never have had societal control especially when factoring in the likelihood that the worlds financial system was implemented by this religious cabal and controlled by it to this day! See my KA$H posts for speculation on this issue--that the worlds financial system is patterned on Christian symbolism isn't a matter of an over-imaginative mind. I'd even go as far to say that some of the early settlers in the Americas were well aware of what I'm suggesting here and were trying to escape the control of these families. We've run out of places to run and they are always 12-moves ahead of us on the chessboard.
And it's at this point that I could see the root cause of a new world conflagration being the battle between religious delusion and its lust for control (money being a new religion too that will bring us to our knees) and secular humanist's who will one day wake up to what's happening to their societies and themselves. We see the start of this with the war on Enlightenment values and the forced integration of mainly religious believers into relatively secular nations; the cordoning off of free speech, the controlled bifurcation of bullying extremists within the extreme right and left within the control grid which is an extension of the communist/capitalist psy-op of the past 150 years. This is being done for financial reasons but is also being done to set the conditions for the one world ruler...
So that covers the materialist view of this phenomenon. Now for some spiritual takes on it. We mostly need to look to alternative views on spirituality to grok what's happening here and the first view would be an old monotheistic view enmeshed within nondual Gnosticism like the Kabbalah. From this view, it's God doing all of it and those who hold this view generally see religion as positive and somehow believe that all these contradictory religions have some kind of sense to them--even Wilber's Integralist view falls into this category. Then there is the view that I hold: a Dualist Gnostic view which leans towards thinking this is all the control matrix of a demiurge who has no conciliation with the transcendent Godhead. This view is, in my opinion, more coherent when it comes to religion and its pathology and contradictoriness.
Another possibility is strictly evolutionary and based on the idea of the Tibetan Rainbow Body phenomenon whose ascended masters are guiding evolution now in ways that science and materialism are yet to understand. There is said to be about 160,000 of these beings but whether they are active here guiding civilization is speculative on my part. Of course, there is the Vedic Lords of Karma possibility but within that one, I don't see the need to have coherent cross-cultural religious narratives because it's evolutionary at its roots, too. So there are four possibilities which could account for all the shenanigans on this earth.
I should touch on the alien/E.T. hypothesis, too, which I don't really believe in but could be possible; this could also be consistent with the spiritual account--it could be both and according to some people I know, it is both.