As an atheist, this is a fascinating analogy, because my take-away is that Elijah made up a story to justify mass execution of political rivals. (Perhaps he played a magic trick, perhaps someone just made the story up whole cloth, but in any case a lie was told to justify a religiously/politically-motivated mass execution.)

This also has a reasonable take-away: sometimes lighting an altar on fire can be faked even when it looks real. Or, "beware the flashy demo". Fusion and especially some of the more shameless corners of AI come to mind.

My apologies if this stretches the analogy too far.