Conviction

It's a human condition to get carried away with our own conviction. Conviction is a powerful thing if for no other reason than the enthusiasm of the totally converted is infectious !
Great oratory is enormously convincing, both for the speaker and the person listening, as ideas and beliefs are expounded the enthusiasm is infectious and the sense of surety it engenders often trumps our own confusion, 'unless' we have spent as great deal of time, bolstering our own argument. 

Listening to a fire and brimstone 'paster' articulate his unshakeable belief, using the specific words and phrases of his bible, each sentence the word of God 

The humanist has his reasoning, the atheist has his scepticism but neither has the 'brimstone'.

Quoting the Bible or the Koran with their resort to mysticism and parable, parables  which rely on a context which is clearly short of scientific reasoning, which defy the carbon time line, the words never the less are interpreted as personal. They are a direct message from God, to each one of us and are therefore often an emotional challenge. 

Perhaps it's this interpretation which we carry in our own minds which allows some of us to accept the story but it's still remarkable that in the 21st century, millions of people thrill to the call of a man who lived 21 centuries ago. The Abrahamic faith and the Muslim faith all draw from the same Well.  All derived from dreams passed down as stories told around the camp fire. 

The passion of the Pastor , the Imam, or the Rabi is a direct result of the mysticism which these Arabic tribes, who lived in a part of the world where life was hard and community meant everything, is the same passion that is still as real today as when it was first felt, in the first telling. 

The advocates of Gods word, the Prophets, had to have an edge, the edge was not only important for their survival but bound one to the other, as a tribe, who's earthly faith was wrapped in the patriarchal leadership. Is it any wonder that the "afterlife" would also be subject to stories and revelations which ensured that life on Earth, which was hard, would be substituted by life after death with something so much more pleasant.