Why would God write a book of lies and why would you worship such a being?

Let me start by commenting on that title line.There is no reason that God would write a book of lies. For that matter, there is no reason that God would write a book at all. As Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the rocks. (Apparently those are part of the words of a song).I grew up in an evangelical Church. People would commonly speak of the Bible as "The word of God." However, I took that to be a metaphor, not a statement of authorship. I suggest that you consider doing the same.Let me expand a little on my history. As a young child, my mother would drag us (me and my siblings) off to the Anglican church that she attended. I hated it. I found it excruciatingly boring. So one day I asked "Do I have to go?" I guess that upset the apple cart. After some family discussion, I was given a choice. I either go with my mother, or I attend some other local church. So I tried an evangelical church that was just down the street. And that was not nearly as boring, perhaps because they encouraged me to read the Bible for myself instead of just listening to sleep-inducing sermons. The best historical evidence seems to support that viewpoint. I recently came across a blog post that asks the same question Why trust the Bible?. I considered commenting on that blog, but decided not to.It is the wrong question. Both you, and the owner of that Doubting Thomas blog, are asking whether or why you can trust the Bible. But what would you thereby be trusting?As I see it, the proper question should be "How can I trust the Bible?" That is to say, what is the appropriate way for me to read and understand the Bible, in a way that I can trust it.I'm a mathematician (and computer scientist). It never occurred to me that I should "trust" my mathematics text books. Likewise, it never occurred to me that I should trust mathematical theorems that are published in research journals. If I want to know whether a theorem is true, I must work through the proof, make sure that I understand the proof, and come to my own conclusion on whether the theorem is true. Such decisions are too important to be a matter of trusting the author.I guess one way of putting that, is that I trusted the math textbooks and the teachers to provide guidance for the direction that my study should take. But I did not trust them to settle questions of truth. I had to settle the truth questions for myself.I'll put it to you that the same holds about the Bible. It is up to you to read it, to understand it, and to decide for yourself the truth question. Use the Bible as a guide for the directions that you should go. But you have to settle the questions of truth for yourself.In my case, I also grew up with an interest in science. A teacher introduced me to science at around age 10, and I shall forever be grateful to that teacher. So when I read Genesis 1, it was clear that the Bible had a lot of details wrong. I did not reject the Bible. I simply concluded that it was not intended as a science text book, and that it was written for pre-scientific peoples. I mention that as an example of coming to find a way of reading the Bible that would allow me to trust it. It seems to me that you have not yet gone through that step.I eventually gave up on religion. But, in a sense, I still trust the Bible. It wasn't lack of trust in the Bible that caused me to junk religion. It was a lack of trust in the theology. The claims of the theologians went way too far beyond what the Bible could support. As a simple example, I never was convinced that Jesus had asserted his own divinity.

I'm puzzled that you cannot see this as metaphor. If your close friend said to you something similar to "Get thee behind me Satan", you surely would not take that as intended literally.