This actually happened to me. I was the protagonist. This is not some second-hand report.

Many years ago I had some friends who happened to attend an Assemblies of God church - an evangelical, pentacostal, baptist sort of deal. They had the whole speaking-in-tongues thing going. One night, just for a lark, I told my church-going friends that I was an agent of the Illuminati. (Important Note: this was a lie. I have never been any such thing.) I thought that we would all have a good laugh about it and move on.

Ho-ho, you think. That's pretty good. But no. They swallowed the whole thing - hook, line and sinker. I talked to them for over two hours about the goals and structure of the Illuminati and the reasons why I "joined up". They completely failed to question even a single word. The whole thing was made up. They believed everything.

This level of gullibility stunned me, then and now. The following day I owned up to my little deception, and to this day I'm certain that they thought I had been "told off" by my superiors and instructed to claim that it was a hoax. They did not believe me when I told them I had lied, such was the strength of their belief in my previous words.

The sad chapter in this story is that I did exactly the same thing when I accepted their word and joined their church. While there I believed every word that they told me. The one I particularly remember now is that they told me that the band Queen was a satanic band. This had been revealed by people who had left the band (as far as I know only one person has left Queen and that was because he died), and was demonstrated by the line in Bohemian Rhapsody - "Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me". They obviously hadn't listened to the whole song.

I particularly remember this one line because it was the one that made me start questioning what they were telling me. When I started thinking about this for myself I realised how disgustingly gullible I had been (and they were still being). So I stopped going to their church and started taking responsibility for my own actions.

The moral of the story: Someone who is gullible enough to believe that the Bible is historically and scientifically accurate will believe anything. You CAN recover if you start thinking for yourself.