So you believe in a book full of contradictions, one that endorses slavery, incest, murder, drowning babies, genocide and stoning homosexuals?

Several of those charges land on real texts, and pretending otherwise is why these conversations go badly: the Bible does contain slavery laws, a flood, and a conquest narrative. But the list bundles together things that are genuinely different, and separating them is most of the answer.

1. Reporting is not endorsing. Genesis 19 records Lot's daughters and does not applaud them. Judges ends with "everyone did what was right in his own eyes" (Judges 21:25) as a verdict on the era, not a recommendation. The Bible is full of people doing terrible things, and the narrator's disapproval is often a chapter later or a book later. A book that only reported good behavior could not tell the truth about humans.

2. Incest is condemned in the same book. Leviticus 18:6 forbids sexual relations with close kin, in a list that includes the exact unions Genesis 19 describes. The narrative shows the deed and the law names it as sin. Calling that endorsement requires ignoring the second half of the canon.

3. Slavery in the Old Testament is regulated, not celebrated. Israel's law assumes slavery exists and then fences it: release in the seventh year, no return to Egypt in spirit, and the memory of their own bondage as the motive (Deuteronomy 15:12-15). Kidnapping a person and selling him carried the death penalty (Exodus 21:16). That is not the chattel slavery of the Atlantic trade, and the difference is not a technicality.

4. The New Testament attacks the root. Paul tells masters to treat slaves justly (Colossians 4:1), sends Onesimus back as "a beloved brother" (Philemon 16), and writes the sentence that eventually broke the institution: "There is neither slave nor free... for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28). He also lists "enslavers" among the lawless (1 Timothy 1:10). The trajectory is abolition, and history followed it.

5. Abolition came from the Bible, not against it. Wilberforce, the Clapham Sect, and the Quakers argued from Scripture for decades until the trade ended. If the Bible were a slavery manual, that outcome is inexplicable. The people who read it most closely were the ones most convinced it demanded emancipation.

6. The conquest texts are the hardest, and I won't soften them. Herem warfare is genuinely disturbing, and Christians who wave it away are not helping. The best defenses — that ancient Near Eastern war language was hyperbolic, that the accounts describe a limited campaign rather than a continent-wide slaughter, that God is portrayed as judge of a culture practicing child sacrifice — are arguments, not magic. Some scholars find them sufficient; others don't. Christians disagree here, and saying so is more honest than pretending the problem is small.

7. The flood rests on a claim about who gives life. If God is the author of life, the question of when he ends it is a different question than if he is not. Job says it: "The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away" (Job 1:21). You may reject that premise. But then the objection is not a contradiction in the Bible; it is a disagreement about whether God exists and has rights over what he made.

8. The stoning laws are civil law for a covenant that ended. Those penalties belonged to Israel's national code under the Sinai covenant, enforced by a theocratic state, and the New Testament never transfers them to the church. Hebrews says the old covenant is obsolete (Hebrews 8:13). Christians who quote Leviticus 20:13 as a program for civil government today are confusing the covenants, and they should be answered by their own book.

9. The charge assumes the standard it attacks. To call genocide evil, or slavery an abomination, you need a real moral standard that binds all people at all times. The Bible supplies one: humans made in God's image (Genesis 1:27). A purely naturalistic account has a harder time explaining why the objector's outrage is anything more than a preference. The objection borrows its moral force from the worldview it is attacking.

The honest summary is that the Bible contains hard texts, commands that belonged to an ended covenant, and narratives that condemn what they report. It also contains the moral vocabulary the objection is using. That is not a book with no problems; it is a book whose problems are smaller than the list suggests and whose moral core is the reason the list sounds like an accusation.

Sources: Paul Copan, Is God a Moral Monster?; Richard Hess; Norman Geisler; James Hoffmeier.

Related challenges:
• The existence of so many Christian denominations indicates the Bible to be inherently unclear. If truly God’s revelation, could we not expect that He would reveal Himself clearly?
• Now if Jesus is God and God cannot be tempted, does it not follow that Jesus cannot be tempted? Yet Matthew 4 clearly presents the temptation of Christ, and thus embroils us in another BIBLICAL CONTRADICTION. Doesn’t it?!
• I don't believe your book - there are over 1000 errors found in the bible - www.1001errors.com