When discussing the obvious shortcomings of biblical morals (slavery, misogyny, homophobia, genocide), I often hear a peculiar argument, one that never sat well with me:

‘you have to understand that biblical morals were meant for the people at that time’.

That argument is peculiar for multiple reasons:
First, it is a tacit admission that the morals as written in the bible aren’t up to today’s standards, and should, therefore, not be used today.

But underlying this is a much bigger issue. Unfortunately, most people are caught up in their biblical history; we often don’t realize that we can’t see the forest for the trees:

According to the bible, God made us. But if he made us, why did he make us the morally backward people we where then? After all, we were able to improve to the point we are today. He could have saved us a lot of suffering, had he poofed us into existence with the morals and ethics we have today.

Yet he didn’t.

Why not? And why make the situation even worse at some arbitrary point in time and encumber us with written rules that from that point on forward were retarding moral progress? If God had wanted us to be moral, shouldn’t he have used the bible to proscribed advanced morals, instead of the de-facto barbaric standards of the time?

Since all we got were primitive morals, that only leaves one conclusion: when he gave us the ten commandments, God thought that we were nearing the apex of morality; that apex was his own moral standard.

If you argue that biblical morals have to be interpreted in the context of time you therefore also argue that god’s morals represent the low watermark of human morals; that we have long surpassed him.