Religion was born out of pure ignorance, and has evolved into a monster, it's costed thousands of years of wasted focus, eight-year olds today know more about nature, the universe, and science than the biggest scholars knew just a few hundred years ago. Just imagine if all the effort that went into writing books over the last few thousand years bisecting and dissecting every aspect of religious belief, was instead spent on understanding our beautiful universe, how different would our world be today?
The Bible is packed with inaccuracies, contradictions, inconsistencies, and fallacies, not to mention racism, homophobia, sexism, and violence. As an historical document, it doesn't match any other records, nor is there any evidence to back up it's claims. Today we pick and choose what we want to take literally and what not, and we explain away anything that doesn't fit our agenda.
It wasn't that long ago that Religion was the only way to explain all the things that science does so wonderfully today, yet millions of people still stubbornly cling to Religion, mostly out of sheer ignorance. Ask any five-year old, what do you do when you get a head-ache? You pop an aspirin. Well let's think about this for a minute, aspirin (or any other medicine) was discovered by doctors, and we accept it without doubt, yet when those same doctors tell us that we share between 97-99% of the same DNA with mice we laugh at them (I won't even mention the chimps). At what point do we choose not to believe what the doctors say? When I was a kid and we would to to go to the Museum of Natural History in NY, we would skip the areas covering human evolution, and dinosaurs, and instead go to the astronomy exhibits, and all the other animal galleries, or we would be told something silly like, "all the dinosaurs were killed in the Mabul". We trust the scientists, and biologists when they teach us about birds and fish, so why do we stop trusting them when they are talking about us?
I myself was once a firm believer in God, I would laugh at the notion that we share a common ancestor with modern apes. The earth is 4.5 billion years old? Ha! What a joke. I was ignorant, I had no frame of reference, I had never been to a science class, I had never read a book about evolution or the big bang, yet I mocked them. It's easy to laugh at these notions, if all you know is what you've been taught in Cheider and Yeshiva, but as I started to educate myself they became less and less laughable. It's too easy today to get information, through the web, books, documentaries and so on.
Believe me - once you have an understanding of nature, evolution and the universe, the silly fairy tales we were taught as a kid will seem like the joke they are.