Fake news from the Garden of Eden

At the risk of annoying your readers by inflicting too much religion on them, I feel compelled to comment on Pope Francis’s reported reference to “fake news” in the biblical story of the Garden of Eden. I assume that His Holiness is more than competent in his knowledge of scripture, so I can only assume that it was the reporter who got things muddled.
We are told that “the Pope referred to Eve being fooled by the snake as “the first ‘fake news’”. The story occurs in Genesis 2-3. God puts Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and tells them that they may eat any fruit except the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, “for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die”.  (Genesis 2:17.)
The snake later persuades Eve to eat the fruit by telling her that she won’t die, but “will be like God, knowing good and evil”.  (Genesis 3:5.) She eats the fruit and gives some to Adam. As soon as they eat it, they realise that they’re naked, and hasten to cover their genitalia.  When the deity finds out, he expels them both from the garden.
With all due respect to His Holiness, the only “fake news” in this story comes, not from the snake, but from the deity. God lied when he told Adam and Eve they would die on the day they ate of the fruit.  They don’t die, but are merely kicked out of the garden. The snake told the truth: they have indeed become like God, in that now they know the difference between good and evil. Why the deity should be so anxious to hide this knowledge from them is never made clear.  What is clear is that it has something to do with the naughty organs between their legs, which they hurry to cover up. The Bible is very coy about this, but obviously we’re talking about sexual knowledge here, identifying it with evil.
There are questions that the Bible doesn’t address. Why did God put the tree in the garden to begin with if he doesn’t want Adam and Eve to eat from it? This looks like a set-up. God is testing them, and they fail the test. Why does he lie to them and tell them they’ll die if they eat the fruit? This looks very much like parents telling their children to eat their spinach, or the bogeyman will get them.
It’s the deity who lies in this improbable tale, and the snake who tells the truth. Makes you wonder how the story ever got into the Bible.
Ye Olde Theologian