"The Golden Calf is a figure from Abrahamic mythology. Way back when, when Judaism wasn't even an organised thing, there were just these people wandering around in a desert who would one day found Israel and Judea, the people said, "We're wandering around in a desert because God told us to! This sucks!" and they went off to one of their religious leaders and said, "Make us a new god who won't tell us to wander around in a desert!" And then, presumably because the populace was threatening him, he told everyone to give him their gold jewelry, and he melted it down and made a statue of a calf, and the people started worshiping that. And then the religious leader's brother who outranked him came down from the mountain where he had been talking to God and completely flipped his lid. And ever since then the Golden Calf has become the iconic false god. Edie's referring to your spaceship that way because presumably the people who came to your planet and gave up their technology and stuff knew that their spaceship wasn't really God, but they told their descendents to worship it anyway."