It is amazing how people fall for nonsense, isn't it? Still do, even now: Qanon, Roswell, free- market economics, economic rationalism, neo--liberalism.... the list goes on. People fall for simplistic stories that make complexity simplistic and easy to understand, something to worship and someone to hate. And it continues.
Imagine, an entire religion based on the statutory rape of a young teenage maiden by a so-called deity, resulting in a half-breed, half-god/half-man (or, as the Catholics believe, all-God/all-man) being who was compelled to sacrifice himself to himself in order to remove the alleged sins of an entire species of primates. Makes sense to me...