@TheAntiBush - "I can understand Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists (they all refer to scripture that at least someone found genuine when it came up)" - Why let them off the hook just because the silly stories they believe are older than Scientology?

People born after the Enlightenment - and especially those born after atheism stopped being punishable by death - have no excuse for believing in superstitious nonsense. I look at it the same way I look at smoking: nobody born after about 1940 has any excuse for being surprised that smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer: the proof was already in. So people choose to smoke, in the full knowledge of the consequences... likewise, people pretend to believe primitive nonsense.

And let's be clear on that: they only pretend to believe. If they truly, genuinely, believed - in their heart of hearts - then they would not take any precautions about any facet of their lives. It they truly believed that everything that happens is part of an inerrant plan, they would cross the road without looking - because if they truly believed, they would believe that their god would save them (or if they died or were maimed, it was because their god wants that  to happen). In fact, failing to truly genuinely believe got you killed (in the Old Testament).

But at the end of the day, it's just charlatans doing what charlatans do. The 'faithful' pretend to believe because it gives them in-group status (among others who pretend to believe).

In the same way, most parents who swear ('curse' as some Americans say), don't permit their children  to swear in front of them, and don't swear in front of the kids. Likewise, the kids swear amongst themselves, but not in front of their parents. So when the two groups interact, both sides pretend that nobody swears: it's a bilateral lie; it's a stupid idea about the pretence of a false version of innocence, and should be mocked.

Here's the skinny: the first agricultural revolution (starting in about 10000BCE in the Middle East, as far as we can tell) enabled humans to produce a surplus for the first time in its history. That enabled human groups to shift from small hunter-gatherer groups with a maximum supportable size of 20-50 individuals, to collections upwards of 200.

And then, the charlatans - who have always existed - discovered a market for their lies; they could extract some of that surplus, and direct it towards themselves. They could get to live in palaces by pretending to be the sole conduit to a supernatural explanation for the world.

People wanted to understand how the world worked: why are there storms? Why do crops fail sometimes? Why did Ugg stop being Ugg when that rock hit him? What happened to Ugg's personality? Why do bad things happen?

The liars among them were prepared (as liars always are) to offer a made-up explanation - of course, one that usually presented themselves as the central conduit between the tribe and the (fictional) supernatural explanation.

Why did Moses claim that Yahweh only wanted to talk to Moses? Why did Moses claim that if anyone else went with him to meet Yahweh, they would die?

Answer: his narrative was made up, and if a large number of people had gone all the way up the mountain they would have discovered that Moses was a charlatan. A few elders (i.e., political insiders) went up the mountain, but they never got to meet Yahweh: they stayed at a base camp (and maybe got convinced to participate in the scam - the forerunners of the likes of Podesta/Wolfowitz/Perle/McCain/Lagarde/Sarkozy/Bayrou... career parasites who know that they are participating in a scam, but also know that it's their most profitable option).

It's really, really obvious when you think hard about it. It's also why scumbags are attracted to positions of religious and political authority.