[EDITED to add: The following was written in response to a comment that has now been deleted—not, I believe, by its author. The comment took exception to what Eliezer said about moral horrors in the Bible.]
The problem with biblical ethics isn’t that the Bible describes things that we now find morally terrible, it’s that it endorses things that we now find morally terrible while claiming (or being claimed) to speak authoritatively for a perfectly good god.
So no one is complaining that the Bible says Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers. They’re complaining about things like Exodus 21:7-10 (where God, speaking through Moses, provides instructions on how best to sell your daughter as a sex slave) or 1 Chronicles 13:9-10 (where the Ark of the Covenant is being transported, and the oxen stumble, and some well-meaning chap puts out a hand to steady it—and God himself strikes him dead for it) or 1 Samuel 15:1-3 (where God, speaking through Samuel, commands an outright genocide of the Amalekites as a punishment for something their ancestors had done) or Deuteronomy 22:28-29 (where God, speaking through Moses, commands that when a man rapes a woman who is neither married nor betrothed, he pays a fine to her father and she becomes his wife). These aren’t merely reporting that moral atrocities happened; they are endorsing and even commanding moral atrocities in the name of God.
From which a reasonable person will conclude that one of three things is true. (1) These documents are not in fact providing reliable information about the god they claim to speak of and speak for. (2) The god in question has moral values so different from ours that we should very decidedly not be worshipping that god. Or (3) the god in question has moral values that have changed radically since those documents were written, in something like the same way as humans’ values have changed. Of these, #1 seems much the most likely, and there is plenty more evidence for it (e.g., the discrepancies between biblical accounts of historical events and the best information we can find about them from other sources) but any of them would mean that these documents do not give us a trustworthy account of how we ought to live.
[EDITED to add: The following was written in response to a comment that has now been deleted—not, I believe, by its author. The comment took exception to what Eliezer said about moral horrors in the Bible.]
The problem with biblical ethics isn’t that the Bible describes things that we now find morally terrible, it’s that it endorses things that we now find morally terrible while claiming (or being claimed) to speak authoritatively for a perfectly good god.
So no one is complaining that the Bible says Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers. They’re complaining about things like Exodus 21:7-10 (where God, speaking through Moses, provides instructions on how best to sell your daughter as a sex slave) or 1 Chronicles 13:9-10 (where the Ark of the Covenant is being transported, and the oxen stumble, and some well-meaning chap puts out a hand to steady it—and God himself strikes him dead for it) or 1 Samuel 15:1-3 (where God, speaking through Samuel, commands an outright genocide of the Amalekites as a punishment for something their ancestors had done) or Deuteronomy 22:28-29 (where God, speaking through Moses, commands that when a man rapes a woman who is neither married nor betrothed, he pays a fine to her father and she becomes his wife). These aren’t merely reporting that moral atrocities happened; they are endorsing and even commanding moral atrocities in the name of God.
From which a reasonable person will conclude that one of three things is true. (1) These documents are not in fact providing reliable information about the god they claim to speak of and speak for. (2) The god in question has moral values so different from ours that we should very decidedly not be worshipping that god. Or (3) the god in question has moral values that have changed radically since those documents were written, in something like the same way as humans’ values have changed. Of these, #1 seems much the most likely, and there is plenty more evidence for it (e.g., the discrepancies between biblical accounts of historical events and the best information we can find about them from other sources) but any of them would mean that these documents do not give us a trustworthy account of how we ought to live.