The bible is immoral.

I would like to begin by pointing out that the Bible is a book from God to man. It contains many different pieces of information, such as rules of morality for us to exhibit, prophecies, God telling us about Himself, poetry, etc. As such, you cannot just read the Bible and apply them all in the same way. For example, there may be certain things that are okay for God to do, but not for us (for example, God is the giver of life; only He has the authority to take it). As such, something that is true for God is not necessarily true for us. It is important to take passages in context rather than pulling them out and saying, “all people at all times are to do this. ” I hope to offer reasonable explanations for the three passages in question. Jeremiah 19:7-9 Here Pro takes issue with the case in which an entire city has been punished for “burning the flesh of their sons after they had already died,” and not the entire town was punished. However, this is a very bizarre objection to this passage, since it is obviously not what they are being punished for. The answer is found a few verses prior:“Behold I am about to bring a calamity upon this place, at which the ears of everyone that hears of it will tingle. Because they have forsaken Me and have made this an alien place and have burned sacrifices in it to other gods, that neither they nor their forefathers nor the kings of Judah had ever known, and because they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent and have built the high places of Baal to burn their sons in the fire as burnt offerings to Baal, a thing which I never commanded or spoke of, nor did it ever enter My mind…” (Jeremiah 19:3b-6a). The people were being punished for their forsaking of God, for their idolatry and worship of other gods, have killed innocent people (through sacrifices to these foreign gods), something which God has never commanded anyone to do. God hates the shedding of innocent blood. We can also be sure that the entire city was guilty of this. Remember that when God brought retribution on Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot and his family were spared because Lot was a righteous man (Genesis 18-19). This is not a case of people being punished for the sins of others. As the Bible elsewhere points out, “The person who sins will die. The son will not bear the punishment for the father’s iniquity, nor will the father bear the punishment for the son’s iniquity; the righteousness of the righteous will be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked will be upon himself” (Ezekiel 18:20). We are responsible for our own sins; we are not punished for the sins of others. Exodus 21:20-21 Here we see that the Bible seems to condone slavery. However, it is important to note the distinction between slavery. Often when people think of slavery, they think of white Americans capturing Africans from their homeland and forcing them to be slaves. However, this is not what slavery was in the Bible. God did not necessarily condone slavery, but he allowed his people to keep slaves. And these were bondservants, which were people who could not afford to live on their own or to support their families, so they would become bondservants to the Israelites, working pretty much as slaves but they and their families would be well taken care of. In fact, the Bible condemns kidnapping (Exodus 21:16). Whether the person was kidnapped to be a personal slave or to be sold as a slave, the penalty for kidnapping was death. Now, some atheists have read this to indicate that this verse allows slaves to be beaten, but this is not the case. In fact, if a slaveowner loses his cool and beats his slave to death, he was to be put to death (because the punishment for murder was death). However, since the slave was, effectively, his property, if he beat the slave and the slave was out for a few days, the loss in revenue he would suffer from the lack of work getting done was the punishment for that. So just because God allowed slavery to happen (which, again, was much different than we think of now) and had rules about it, does not mean he condoned the behavior. There were some practices (divorce being another) which God condemned, but allowed due to the hardness of his peoples’ hearts (Matthew 19:8). Deuteronomy 21:18-21 At first blush, this seems harsh. But remember the passage I quoted earlier, that we are all responsible for our own sin. We may not condone stoning to death now, but Old Testament Judaism was a Theocracy. They were directly led by God. God’s standard is perfection and his punishments were, at times, harsh. There were many things besides murder which were deserving of death. But we live under the New Covenant now (in New Testament times), so we no longer carry out Old Testament punishments. Appealing to verses like this does not disprove that the Bible is an acceptable source of morality. We look to the New Testament as our guide for the time that we live in. However, remember that sin is very heinous to God. In fact, Jesus said that the fifth commandment (“honor your father and mother”) was the first commandment with promise (“that your days shall be long on the earth”). Disobeying parents was grievous to God (especially since He is, essentially, our Father). Children were to be chastised, but in cases where children were too depraved to listen to correction or to honor their parents, engaging in drunkenness and other forms of disgraceful behavior, bared heavy punishment. The child has no one to blame but themselves, since they knew the Law, just as their parents did. Pro has not shown that the Bible is an unreliable book for morality. He has merely appealed to obscure passages in the Old Testament, took them out of context, and tried to show that they meant something contrary than their intended meaning. The church doesn’t hide anything from its congregation. My Bible has the exact same number of passages as my pastor’s does. The reason that Christianity no longer follows these rules is because 1) We are not under a Theocracy, and 2) crimes and punishments are different in New Testament times than in Old Testament times. This doesn’t mean the Bible is unreliable for morality, just that atheists need to take more time to actually study the thing they are trying to attack.