Outgrowing the Bible

I STARTED READING THE BIBLE when I was about ten years old, and immediately became suspicious. It begins beautifully: "in the beginning", but soon becomes murky. Questions multiply. Why does God speak in the third person? I had by the age of ten been brainwashed by society to believe that the Bible is the Word of God, but from the beginning I had doubts, and they grew. For God to fashion Adam from clay and to fashion Eve from Adam's rib seemed from the outset a bit fairy tale-ish. So did the entire creation account, for that matter. This sense of the Bible being rather like a fairy tale increased as I aged, turning eleven and twelve, completing grade school, moving into junior high school. I outgrew the Bible, just like I outgrew Santa Claus and the tooth fairy. I replaced it all with good, demonstrable, proven science, chemistry, evolution and cosmology, thank you very much. This raises the question: why doesn't everybody grow out of literally believing in the Bible? Everybody outgrows all the other fairy tales, why everybody doesn't replace Biblical truth with a more advanced version of reality as they gain new knowledge is worthy of conjecture. To what extent is it beneficial to dwell in fantasy? And I do mean dwell. If the Bible prevents you from accepting the obvious reality of Darwinian evolution, you have a dwelling problem. The Bible had a great advantage in becoming the most popular and most important book of all time. It was agreed upon as the official church canon by a large and powerful group of people, and distributed widely, with great intent. In essence, the bible got off to a good start due to a very effective publicity campaign promoting it as the official church doctrine. Then, over time, it morphed into the Word of God. The Emperor Constantine, an enthusiastic late convert to the Christian faith, decided the church and its canonical scripture must be organized, and so it came to be. The Bible is such a long book that few people ever read it through, but accept it as God's word nonetheless. If they actually read it, they would be horrified, shocked by all the violence, and by God's behavior, which is that of a psychotic mass murderer. Thomas Paine, in his immortal 1794 essay "The Age of Reason", marvels that anybody can accept the Bible as the word of God. In Paine's view, the book seems more like the word of a demon. It is, beyond question, the most violent book I have ever read, personally. In the great ongoing evolution of the human mind, there doubtless shall come a day when humanity dispenses with the ludicrous and unproductive notion that a book, any book, can ever be written by a god.