The Egyptians (Ancient and present-day Baladi) did/do not believe their allegories as historical facts. They believed IN them, in the sense that they believed in the truth beneath the stories.
The Christian religion threw away and lost the very soul of their meaning when it mistranslated the Ancient Egyptian allegorical language into alleged history, instead of viewing it as spiritual allegory. The result was a pathetic, blind faith in a kind of emotional and superstitious supernaturalism, and effectively aborted the real power of the story/allegory to transform the life of every individual.
http://www.egypt-tehuti.org/articles/holy-families.
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