Religion is a powerful force... for anything you want. Give me any bible verse to support a claim and I will give you 2 bible verses that support the opposite claim.
Faith in Man
What evidence is there for the divinity of any holy book or the truth of any religion? Let us remember that our faith is always in man first before it can be in the object of his stories. So if you say, "I have faith in Jesus," you must first say, "I have faith in the stories of man," because that is how we learn of Jesus. Any and all stories of a spiritual world comes from man. Every religion was started by man. Plenty of great men in history were claimed to be fathered by gods. Prophets are men. Holy books are written and edited by man. If you have no faith in the unsubstantiated stories of man, then suddenly there is no religion.
Why Would Man Lie About Religion?
It is possible man never lied, but truly believes all the things he says. I know I did when I was blindly religious. But how/why did it begin? Consider primitive man looking in awe at the billions of stars in the night sky, rejoicing in the warmth of the sun as it magically rises yet again, and cowering from the trauma of storms, floods, earthquakes, and other natural disasters. How does primitive man explain all this before science has learned the truth? Gods. And from there it grew.
More Bible Study!
I encourage you to continue studying this imperfect bible and you will soon find all its many contradictions, its mythological things like talking snakes, talking donkeys, unicorns, satyrs (men with goat legs), dragons (dinosaurs?), 7 headed dragons, 7 headed leopards, leviathans (dinosaurs?), giants (angel/human hybrids), animals covered with eyes, behemoths (with a 'tail like a cedar', dinosaurs?), cockatrices (serpent/cock hybrids, dinosaurs?), sorcerers, witches, fortune tellers, mediums, and magicians all with real power (not like the fake ones we have today), an impossible global flood, unfulfilled prophecies, unfulfilled/broken promises by God, a schizophrenic insane jealous humble hateful loving god, and testable new testament claims (ie. ask Jesus for anything and you get it, and drinking poison wont harm believers). I recommend http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/by_name.html and http://thebricktestament.com (the largest illustrated bible in the world).
"Is it more probable that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie? We have never seen, in our time, nature go out of her course, but we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same time; it is therefore at least millions to one, that the reporter of a miracle tells a lie." - Thomas Paine
