Adultery.
I refuse to accept the Bible as a moral guide because it sanctions adultery and prostitution.
Adultery is made prominent by the recital of the numerous adulteries of Abraham, Lot, Jacob, Judah, Samson, David, and other Bible saints, and sanctified by the approved adulteries of Abraham and Jacob.
Both Abraham and Isaac were willing to sell the virtue of their wives to save themselves from harm.
Two instances are recorded of fathers having offered their own daughters to gratify the lust of a sensual mob, and these abominable acts are represented as especially meritorious. Read the nineteenth chapter of Genesis and the nineteenth chapter of Judges; dwell upon the eighth verse of the former and the twenty-fourth verse of the latter; and then, if you can indorse the spirit of these narratives, you are unfit to be the parent of a daughter.
The Mosaic law authorizes a father to sell his daughter for a concubine or mistress (euphemistically translated “maid servant”). God’s instructions respecting the thirty-two thousand captive Midianite maidens impliedly sanction concubinage and prostitution.
These Bible teachings have been the cause of countless outrages against the chastity of woman. John Wesley says:
“Almost all the soldiers in the Christian world ... have claimed, more especially in time of war, another kind of liberty: that of borrowing the wives and daughters of the men that fell into their hands” (Wesley’s Miscellaneous Works, Vol. III., p. 117).
Luther, drawing his morality from the Bible, gave concubinage his indorsement:
“There is nothing unusual in princes keeping concubines; and although the lower orders may not perceive the excuses of the thing, the more intelligent know how to make allowance” (Consilium).