"Don't let your modern ideals get in the way of understanding an ancient culture and a loving God."
This is moral relativism. You're saying morality was different then. That's the position you're arguing against.
The Bible doesn't merely describe slavery -- it prescribes it:
Leviticus 25:44-46: "Your male and female slaves are to come from
the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves... You can
bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make
them slaves for life."
(a) Slavery is moral (defend this publicly)
(b) You're bearing false witness about what the Bible says,
flagrantly breaking one of the ten commandments.
Re: "atheists don't understand the Bible" -- Pew Research (2010) tested this empirically. Results:
Overall religious knowledge (32 questions):
- Atheists/Agnostics: 20.9 correct
- Jews: 20.5
- Mormons: 20.3
- White Evangelicals: 17.6
As an atheist who probably knows the bible even better than you do (and I can quote the parts about slavery and treating women like shit, and you're the one who misunderstands it, since you've just proven yourself by your own words to be an unwitting moral relativist), I vigorously endorse your recommendation that everyone should read the bible, since that's the best way to defeat it!
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2010/09/28/u-s-religiou...
If you were an indentured slave and gave birth to children, those children were not indentured slaves, they were chattel slaves. Exodus 21:4:
> If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the woman and her children shall belong to her master, and only the man shall go free.
The children remained the master's permanent property, and they could not participate in Jubilee. Also, three verses later:
> When a man sells his daughter as a slave...
The daughter had no say in this. By "fellow Israelites," you actually mean adult male Israelites in clean legal standing. If you were a woman, or accused of a crime, or the subject of Israelite war conquests, you're out of luck. Let me know if you would like to debate this in greater academic depth.
It's also debatable then as now whether anyone ever "willingly" became a slave to pay off their debts. Debtors' prisons don't have a great ethical record, historically speaking.