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

The list is built to shock, and parts of it should. Some of these texts are severe, and a Christian who answers with a shrug has not read them. But the list also lumps together what the Bible commands, what it permits, and what it merely reports — and that distinction does most of the work.

1. Recording is not endorsing. The Bible reports murder, incest, and atrocity because it reports human history honestly. Genesis says “it grieved him to his heart” (Genesis 6:6) about the violence it describes — grief is the tone, not approval. Judges reports gang rape and civil war without commending either.

2. Ask whether the text commands, permits, or reports. That is the first question to put to any passage. “Go and do likewise” is a command; “David did what was evil in the sight of the LORD” is a report with a verdict attached. Many alleged endorsements turn out to be narratives of sin and its consequences.

3. Genre governs meaning. The Bible contains law codes, poetry, proverbs, prophecy, letters, and narrative. Reading a psalm as physics, or a proverb as an absolute promise, manufactures contradictions. Most of the standard lists dissolve under the ordinary rules of reading.

4. Slavery in Israel was regulated, then undermined. Kidnapping a person to sell was a capital crime (Exodus 21:16); a Hebrew servant was to be treated as a hired worker, not a slave (Leviticus 25:39–43); and Israel was told not to return an escaped slave to his master (Deuteronomy 23:15–16). Paul lists “enslavers” among the lawless (1 Timothy 1:10) and tells Philemon to receive Onesimus “no longer as a slave but ... as a beloved brother” (Philemon 16).

5. Christians who defended slavery were wrong. They read their own economy into the text; the abolitionists read the trajectory out of it. It is worth saying plainly that the defenders lost on exegetical grounds. The church's record here is a real failure, not a misunderstanding invented by critics.

6. The conquest is the hardest text here. Deuteronomy presents the Canaanite nations as judged for practices including child sacrifice (Deuteronomy 12:31), and Genesis says God waited centuries before judgment (Genesis 15:16). Christians genuinely differ on how to read the herem commands — some as literal judgment, some as ancient Near Eastern hyperbole for total victory. Serious scholars argue both, and neither reading makes the passage comfortable.

7. Contradictions: the variants are real, doctrine is not. The manuscripts contain genuine variants, and believing scholars like Daniel Wallace discuss them openly. What is striking is how few touch anything doctrinal. The lists usually recycle the same handful of examples, most of which have had careful answers for centuries, and the ones that remain are about numbers or sequence rather than about who God is.

8. Turn it around: the outrage borrows from the Bible. The charge that genocide is evil depends on the conviction that human beings have immense value. That conviction comes from Genesis — humans made in God's image (Genesis 1:27) — not from a mindless process. The objection uses a biblical premise to indict the Bible.

9. On homosexuality, the traditional reading and the tone. The historic reading holds that Scripture reserves sexual union for marriage between a man and a woman (Genesis 2:24; Romans 1:26–27), and 1 Corinthians 6:9–11 names the practice among sins — then says “such were some of you,” which is a sentence about grace, not contempt. Some Christians read the texts differently. What Scripture does not permit is cruelty: every person bears God's image, and Jesus commands love of neighbour (Matthew 22:39).

10. The Bible's own arc moves toward the outsider. “You shall love the sojourner” (Deuteronomy 10:19); the Sabbath rest includes servants; Paul says that in Christ there is neither slave nor free (Galatians 3:28). That trajectory is internal to the text, which is why abolitionists could argue from Scripture against the slaveholders. A book that keeps correcting its readers is not a book that endorses everything it reports.

The list works by flattening command, permission, and report into one category called “the Bible says,” and by treating narrative description as endorsement. Once those are separated, most of the list collapses and the hardest texts remain hard. That is the honest position: a book with severe passages, a God who judges evil, and a trajectory that ends by condemning the very things the objection accuses it of loving.

Sources: Paul Copan; Is God a Moral Monster?; Norman Geisler; Thomas Howe; Big Book of Bible Difficulties; Daniel B. Wallace; Sam Allberry; Is God Anti-Gay?; John Walton.

Related challenges:
• Dennis McKinsey single-handedly disproves Biblical inerrancy in his book, "Biblical Errancy" - your team should read it.
• The Bible is a collection of fairytales written by illiterate goat herders back in the Bronze Age. The Catholic Church cherry picked which fables to include to mind control non-thinking tithers.