You know the old story about the six year old who came home from Sunday School? His father asked him what he learned. He said he learned about the Jews leaving Egypt. He told his father about Moses and how they got to the Red Sea and how God sent airplanes and helicopters to take them to the other side.

His father looked at him with astonishment. “That’s what they told you?”, he asked?

The boy looked at his father sheepishly and replied: “Not really. But if I told you what they really said, you’d never believe me.”

For thousands of years, people have truly believed that God opened up the waters so that the Jews could cross into Sinai and then closed the waters up again to drown the Pharaoh’s troops. You may be one of them.

About a thousand years after that historic event, another equally historic happening occurred. Jesus of Nazareth, a clearly uppity and charismatic young Jewish fellow, was crucified by the Romans after some January 6 types of events. Since that time, many have believed that he was in fact God’s son and that three days after his funeral he was raised from the dead. You may be one of them.

Closer to our time, there have been many people who believe that there is a group of elite Jewish leaders, the Elders of Zion, who hold regular meetings to decide the next steps to achieving control of the world. There are others who believe that, before Passover, Jews kidnap and murder Christian children, because the blood of Christian children is a necessary ingredient in the baking of matzahs. You are probably not one who believes these stories.

If you are not part of any of these groups of believers, you may think: How can people be so gullible to take these “stories” so literally?

Four or five years ago, someone said that the United States is run by elite members of a hidden Deep State and that many of these people, led by Hillary Clinton, are in fact pedophiles who kidnap and murder young children. The author of this tale is the mysterious Q, who also believes that Donald Trump alone can fix it. Apparently there are MANY who believe Q without qualms.

It may be that believing the Moses and Jesus stories is more acceptable in general society. But in terms of people being convinced of the truth of things that are clearly “irrational”, how much of a difference is there?

Today, belief in the two biblical stories is relatively harmless. By that, I mean that a non-believer is probably not adverselyaffected by the beliefs of a believer. In past years, of course, people holding these beliefs could be unrelenting towards those who didn’t. On the other hand, irrational beliefs about Jewish practices can have devastating consequences and feed increasing antisemitism, and belief in the Q theory threatens our very form of government.

You never know when the next Q/God/Elders/Jesus story will appear. With social media’s continually increasing spread, Artificial Intelligence, the ability to manipulate photographs, the decline of educational standards, and broad scale political greed, it probably won’t be too long.

Do we really think anything can be done about this? We don’t even want to abolish belief in the Moses and Jesus stories. We only want to eliminate those irrational beliefs with which we disagree, or which threaten us.

What is it that they say about the human condition?