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1) Holy books are meaningless because they are factually incorrect. (The Bible is not a textbook)

In this section I will be referring almost exclusively to Christianity, simply because I have not read the holy book of any other religion. 

For some, the Bible is absolutely literal. For those people I can say but little. The Earth was not created 6000 years ago. This is as much a historical fact as any other. To uphold such a belief is to be on par with those who say the Earth is flat, or the center of the universe. 

For those who interpret the Bible metaphorically, it almost cannot be invalidated factually. (Obviously if it were proven Jesus never lived, this would cause Christianity some inconvenience.) Many have learned to allow passages that simply illustrate a lack of understanding to be taken in that context. Obviously the writers of the Bible did not know everything about the universe; otherwise the Bible could indeed be used as a textbook. What is most interesting, though, are the contradictions of the Bible, and it is these contradictions that can invalidate it without any striking claims against the facts of the Bible.

An example of this comes in the story of Jesus' birth. Matthew and Luke claim that Jesus was born of a virgin, while Mark, John, and Paul seem to be unaware of this miracle. Matthew incorrectly quotes Isaiah 7:14 as "The virgin will be with child..." In fact, the Hebrew word which is often mistranslated as "virgin" means only "young woman." It almost seems as though, in an effort to validate Jesus as the Messiah, the two gospel writers mistranslated a passage in Isaiah, and hurriedly changed Jesus' story to fit prophecy rather than facts. Yet it is the Bible itself that points out this inconsistency, not any direct study of Mary's sexual history. 

The most obvious example, though, is the irony of the nature of God in the Old Testament. By human standards, he is wrathful, jealous, genocidal, infanticidal, vengeful, pestilential; in other words, were the God of the Old Testament to come in human form, he would be, by human standards, an awful, nasty person. In fact, all the more ironically, it seems he would be in almost every way Jesus' opposite. Christians use "What would Jesus do," in lieu of "What would the God of the Old Testament do" for a reason; an eye for an eye would be the best you could hope for. Unfortunately, the Old Testament is largely ignored by most Christians, save for a few tips in Proverbs and Psalms. This failing usually causes Christians to see their God as peaceful, identical in nature to Jesus, when it is difficult to find scripture that shows a side of the Christian God that resembles Jesus at all. 

I look forward to the day that, rather than following, word for word, books that are millennia old, we subject our spiritual ideas to reality. There is no reason that spirituality cannot take its place as a field of knowledge, rather than a blatant ignorance of knowledge. Through strict adherence to holy books, religion sets up a context in which we can never learn anything new about spirituality; it is this cage that we must escape if we are ever to leave the dark ages in terms of spiritual knowledge.