Religious leaders today are so far removed from the times when
the deities they think they represent were first worshiped that it's like stories told about ancestors multiple generations in the past. "I read in a book that it was told to people who were told by other people who were, in turn, told by still other people that this is how things were and are."
Really, "In the beginning," there was a campfire where a small band of shivering humans sat around and listened as some clever elder told stories that were told to them around some other campfire. Eventually, once writing was developed, the current versions of those stories were written down. Over many generations, they were written, rewritten, edited, changed, translated into other languages and manipulated by political characters until we have the old stories that are still being told.
If you look at the oldest of the stories and compare them with the old stories of other religions or even older religions, it seems as though they're all the same stories, just changed though a generation-by-generation game of "Telephone." They're all very much alike, really. The cast of deities changes, and the place names change, but the fundamental moral and ethical rules stay pretty the same. There's still some sort of creation myth, fanciful histories that glorify whatever group is telling the stories, and some path to a better place after our inevitable deaths.
And we're still metaphorically sitting around those old campfires, taking it all in and making it all part of our learned, unquestioned concepts of things.
We have not made a lot of progress in that area, as a species, I think. We keep trying, though. Maybe we'll put all that mythology aside one day and behave rationally.
Is that just my opinion? Why, yes, it is. Is it incorrect? Maybe, but nobody has any evidence that it is not a likely version of what happened. So, I'm sticking with it. I'm not going to be riding the religion bandwagon.
= new reply since forum marked as read
That's OK, unless they try to tell me some old stories. 
