But you do need the bible to understand the world? Whereas we can gain no insight from philosophy? This is your implication.
I'd say, philosophically, that quite the opposite is true, that the bible can do unimaginable harm to a child's mind if the parents are bible readers and adhere more or less automatically to the biblical precepts. To say that we were brought up on the bible amounts to saying that we were utterly destroyed, Mad elephant Man. The bible is the supreme annihilator of the child's soul, the supreme inspirer of terror, the supreme destroyer of character. That's the truth. And it's even a rather puerile and unsophisticated mythology! Untold millions owe it to the bible that they have been utterly destroyed, that their lives have been denaturized. The religious organizations and churches that have disseminated this bible mania throughout our civilization have the destruction of the human personality on their consciences--that's the truth. For the Christian churches won't tolerate any human being other than a Christian human being. Their unswerving aim is to turn human beings into what they insolently call the faithful, mindless creatures who have forgotten how to think for themselves and betrayed independence of thought to the Christian religion--that's the truth, I once told Gambetti on the Pincio. Most children always delighted in Christian ritual, which at first seemed like a fairy tale, undoubtedly the most beautiful we knew. And for grown-ups it was a life-long spectacle, the only one they knew. But the fairy tale and the spectacle between them have perverted and destroyed all that's natural in human beings. Using the fairy tale for the children and the spectacle for the adults, the Christian churches pursue a single aim, the total seduction of all those who fall into their clutches. It uses the fairy tale and the spectacle to bend them to their will, to extinguish them as human beings, to turn them into unthinking Christians who feel their unique source of consciousness and hope is the bible and have no will of their own, no curiosity to expand their knowledge, no interest in philosophical inquiries. The Christian faith armed with the bible, like all faiths, is a perversion of nature, is a sickness to which millions succumb quite deliberately because it's their only salvation, the salvation of the weak, who are incapable of independent thought and, having no minds of their own, need a higher mind to think for them. Christians allow their religious institutions and the bible to think for them and consequently act for them, because this makes their lives easier and they're convinced they can't do otherwise. And the Christian mind of the Christian churches, unlike that of the Greek philosophers, has a terrible way of thinking, wholly self-serving and inimical to human nature, conducive only to its own ends and own glory. This is especially the case among the priesthood and ministry. When the need arises, such people are never more unscrupulous than in their dealings with members of their own congregation. They recoil from no baseness, and under the cloak of Christian principle, high-mindedness, and social consciousness, they are merely rapacious and treat everyone as fair game.
Guided by the bible and under their leadership the Christian mind does all the thinking in our civilization. Everywhere we are confronted by the Christian spirit, which for centuries under orthodoxy has at least admittedly given us hundreds and thousands of orthodox works of art but destroyed the spirit of freedom and independence, the only natural spirit. What use are all these orthodox artworks, orthodox churches and palaces, if for centuries we have had no minds of our own? To say nothing about the vapid fundamentalism of the protestant evangelicals! Only in recent decades in our civilization have there been hints of emancipation from biblical domination, from the monstrous pressure of the Christian churches, from the old-age stranglehold of Christianity. Only in recently has it become possible to discern, here and there, the tentative emergence of a kind of thinking and philosophizing that owes nothing to Christianity. Only in recent decades have a few Western minds begun to think independently, to use their Western heads, not just their Christian heads. Christianity and the bible are to blame for the fact that for so many centuries Western civilization had no philosophers, no philosophical thought, no philosophy. It's fair to say that until the nineteenth century for the past one thousand five hundred years all thought had been ruthlessly suppressed by the Christian faith and the biblical exegesis. And the civilization has made life easy for itself under the aegis of the Christian mind, which has always done its thinking for it, on a proxy basis and in its own way. In the last one thousand five hundred years Christianity and mercantilism have had a devastating effect, a lethal effect on the Western spirit, as all the evidence shows. In these one thousand five hundred years, on can say, Christianity and mercantilism extirpated thought and ushered in an efflorescence of consumerism. The mind having been suppressed for centuries, the West became the land of consumerism. Having become a thoroughly mindless people during the centuries of Christianity and mercantilism, we are now a thoroughly consumerist people. Having become a thoroughly mindless people during the centuries of Christianity, we have allowed mercantilism to take over and allowed consumerism to flourish. No other civilization, except the Muslims, has allowed the religious institutions and scripture to rob it so unscrupulously of the faculty of thought, no other civilization has allowed itself to be decapitated, as it were, by the bible.