My greater concern is that the Bible itself plainly endorses behavior that almost everyone today would find repugnant, including slavery, genocide, “holy wars,” witch-hunting, dictatorship, death penalty for homosexuality, second-class treatment of women, and racism.

My opinion is that there is truth, error, and unfairness in this statement.

Consider slavery: To be fair to what the Bible legislated and allowed in ancient cultural contexts, you need to consider the cultural context. As analogy, Abraham Lincoln made statements about slavery and Black people that would be repugnant to us as well, yet he worked against forces of his time as appropriate. He is judged by the context of his setting, not ours. The writings of the Bible did not occur in our culture, they occurred in ancient cultures which were often worse than what the Bible allows. Slavery is allowed but tempered in the OT. Much more tempered in the NT. Consider the effect of telling a Roman citizen (normally very superior to slaves) that he is brother and co-heir and co-citizen of Heaven with a slave – that was a powerful and different idea! Slavery as practiced by the theocratic Jews, vis-a-vis other ancient Near East (ANE) represented something better. We are not theocratic Jews surrounded by ANE cultures so we can’t just rip passages that allow slavery at all from that context and judge it by ours.

Genocide and holy wars: God did send his people to destroy the people of Canaan. This is a hard thought for me. But realize that God explicitly stated that the 400 years of slavery in Egypt was partly God being patient with the people Israel would eventually destroy (Gen 15:16). God gave his people the land of Canaan. They were to take it by warfare – not something different than the land was contemporaneously experiencing, other than now Yahweh was taking charge over the other gods. This was not Nazi-style cruelty with ambitions for conquering world. It was specific and local. It may be small comfort but they respected the bodies of the dead – another difference from some modern and almost all ancient cultures.

This war had a specific goal. It occurred after God showed 400 years of patience, again in the ANE culture with the theocratic Jews. We now live in a completely different context. There exists no standing decree from the Bible that is anything like holy war or genocide today. In fact, quite the opposite. Sermon on the mount and fruit of the Spirit, for example.

Dictatorship? ANE cultures had kings. The Israelites wanted a king, even when God didn’t want them to institute one. Where does the Bible prescribe rather than describe kings? Even the word dictator is an unfairly emotionally loaded term against the context of ancient politics. You just threw that one in to spice up the list

Racism: Not a fair comparison. Outsiders were allowed to convert in to the Hebrew culture – witness Rahab and Ruth. But again, ANE cultures at war with each other and all that – the racism issue just doesn’t compare to today. Religious, geographical and political realities are completely different.

I am not an apologist. These are just some of my understandings and opinions. I’m sure there are better responses. Also, the Christian tent is pretty broad. So Webb can write about Slaves, Women, and Homosexuals and have a very different understanding than the majority of those who frequent this blog. Point is, yes there are some hard passages. But at the very least those were often specific occasions, with parameters. The Bible does not plainly endorse genocide, holy wars, witch-hunting, etc.

In the end, I believe God is loving and just. Even though we don’t always understand him, I think ultimately we will realize he was always willing to go the extra mile for us. I do not believe anyone will find him to have taken unfair advantage but rather find that we as people are constantly guilty of attempting to take unfair advantage of him.

Clearly, it is as absurd to hold all atheists responsible for the bad actions of some atheists as it is to hold all Christians responsible for the bad actions of some Christians. Each person should be judged on their own behavior.

But I seem to remember someone implicating blame on an entire religion from individual behaviors… let me think… oh yes.

ex-preacher says: I’m curious – what were Baptists doing to try to overturn those unjust laws prior to 1967?

ex-preacher says: Hitler was a Catholic.

ex-preacher says: hardly any Christians objected to slavery until the Enlightment of the 18th century

ex-preacher says: So how do you explain the fact that the abortion rate, teen pregnancy rate, divorce rate and crime rate are all higher in overwhelmingly Christian America than in overwhelmingly secular Europe, Australia and Japan?

Darius T says : “Those aren’t believers, they’re just a cult who does whatever Fred Phelps says.”
ex-preacher respond: A perfect example of the “No True Scotsman” fallacy.

My greater concern is that the Bible itself plainly endorses behavior that almost everyone today would find repugnant

The nice thing about being an atheist is that we can bury our heads in the sand when it comes to our own atrocities and foundation of our beliefs. So what if a couple of atheists decides to kill 80 million people based on their atheist morality, atheists don’t have a problem with their atheist foundation. Atheists can make morality whatever we want it to be, because there is no absolute moral lawgiver. Man must decide for themselves what morality is for themselves “It’s morality when you have decided yourself, without benefits or threats, that this is the right thing to do.” Someone gave me that quote once. To that I said you are right, even the great atheist Bertrand Russell said:

That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins – all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

The important thing is that we atheists know who we are, where we come from and the purpose of our existence. .

Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people. – Carl Sagan

In an atheistic framework there is no difference in the death of a human being from a monkey, snake, catfish or a virus. We are nothing more than a subgroup of catarrhines made of nothing more than the meaningless collection of star dust.

Does this atheistic framework bother an atheist? Does it give an atheist any legitimacy to question anyone else’s moral values? It doesn’t matter. We are atheists with our heads firmly planted in the sand. We only take it out long enough to attack the Christians.

2 Peter 2:17-22
Ephesians 4:17-18

It also doesn’t endorse genocide. Just because God chose to wipe out some terribly evil tribes of people (they sacrificed their own children) doesn’t mean that it endorses anyone taking it upon themselves to do likewise.

As for witch-hunting, I think it mentions sorcerers in passing, but doesn’t spend much time on that subject. Women are treated BETTER in the Bible than they ever were in the cultures around them back in ancient times and Christian women are treated better today than non-Christian women. The Bible also preaches AGAINST racism, not for it. It’s amazing how you could be so illiterate in the Bible and yet have been a preacher at one point.

My greater concern is that the Bible itself plainly endorses behavior that almost everyone today would find repugnant, including slavery, genocide, “holy wars,” witch-hunting, dictatorship, death penalty for homosexuality, second-class treatment of women, and racism.

When Christians practiced these things, they were actually obeying the Bible, not violating it. What is astounding is the way that Christians explain away these passages as society comes to reject these behaviors as degrading to human dignity.

Scripture has always called us to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and to love our neighbor as ourselves. The church, comprised of fallen people, has done terrible, fallen things. Some of these things were done with the certainty that Scripture gave the authority to do so. Jesus himself was killed by religious leaders twisting the Scripture and bent on preserving their status quo. This fact startles me into epistemic and hermeneutic humility.

Something else Twain is not being fair to is the hermeneutical spiral – those who honestly wish to live by Scripture bring better questions back to the text after trying to live what it says in their culture. On the basis of Scripture, many have defended the poor, the orphans, the widows. Scripture can and does work organically within cultures to improve the culture.

Here’s a completely unrelated thought but meaningful to me: why did God preserve liturgy and literature that involve cries of pain, even anger, in his seeming absence? If you were God, would you let your scriptures, liturgy included, contain those writings?

I believe that we all wish for a world with more love, joy, peace, gentleness, respect, so on. I believe that the more we try, the more we fail; yet we find when we turn to him that God enables us to begin a step at a time growing in these things. Why should this be? It makes the story of the Bible make sense to me – that we are fallen creatures, stamped with both dignity and depravity. We, along with the rest of creation, hunger for God’s redemption.

That’s not a formal proof, just conversation. Take it for what it’s worth.

anyone here willing to actually defend the Bible?

What makes you think that anyone needs to defend the Bible to a proselytizing atheist who has absolutely no moral authority to question anyone let alone the Bible? You can’t even defend your own atrocities throughout history. Why don’t you figure out how to defend your atheist atrocities before you look beyond your own nose.

For example, hardly any Christians objected to slavery until the Enlightment of the 18th century.

Right, and where are those great atheists who trumpeted the revolution against slavery? Did it started with their knuckle dragging ancestors crushing the skulls of other primates? Where were these great atheists when Stalin and Mao murdered 80 million people? Where were the atheists who opposed their brand of atheism? Oh, wait they were busy joining the communist party, with atheists like Margaret Sanger who use eugenics to weed out what she considers as the undesirables. Or that great atheist Jean-Paul Sartre who was so enamored with Marxism that he turned a blind eye to atheist atrocities. How about more recently with the great atheist Paul Kurtz who speaks fondly of Marxism even with all the blood dripping through its hands. What about all the atheists like you who stand idly by while the mass murder of the unborn is taking place? Maybe you think it is sufficient to just say this is beyond your pay grade.

Wait forgive me I forget, atheists are amoral. You have no foundation for a moral compass, any moral foundation that you have are only borrowed from Christians. So please keep your feign morality to your amoral atheists comrades, you have no authority to question anyone else.