Or did it ever exist to begin with?
How much of history played out literally as we experience it - and how much has simply come to be as a result of the way things currently are?
Quantum Mechanics has some curious potential when it comes to describing the macroscopic nature of reality. Information isn't necessarily lost, but there is a limit to how much information can be known, and this means that just as a particle isn't there until you ask where it is - the nature of sufficiently distant history can be similarly malleable. Granted… What is sufficiently distant?
But more to the point, the question should be… Do patriots share classified information? Secret orders keep secrets for a reason and have a process of teaching others those secrets for a reason. You assume these are nefarious reasons… And rely upon the information revealed by traitors to that process (or outside onlookers trying to scope the teachings through the secrecy) to form your opinion.
Just as easily as I could secretly teach people to be evil - someone else could simply reveal things that people will think makes me evil.
Stupid is as stupid does.
Evil is as evil does.
I can present an argument to you that God is evil and that Cain was our savior. I can present to you an argument that God is just and Cain a heinous criminal.
However, when you stand people in front of a crime unfolding - do they appeal to a church or a god to understand good from evil - or do they simply know? If you were to stand a god in front of them and have it rape the designated heretics - would they agree such a thing was a true god - or decry it as some demon to be vanquished?
The question I would ask is whether the god you are being sold in a religion is the God who would be commonly understood to be good/benevolent? Dare I suggest that the old concepts of spirituality were far more advanced than what has been refined into religion. But the mind not prepared to engage in such a journey/quest is going to reject such a thing in favor of the simplicity and structure of religion.