Natural laws are perfectly ethical in that they are sure, reliable, predictable, reasonable, consistent with fact, and are just in that they exert themselves with no partiality.
 
Ethics, including kindness, respect for life and property, fairness, and honesty, are a reflection of those laws. Like nature's laws, which are true and consistent, not arbitrary, right and wrong are not arbitrary either. Where the distinction between right and wrong seems blurred, the created conscience within each of us is the arbiter.  
 
Since holy books are claimed to be the source of ethics and morality, one would most certainly expect those books to reflect the highest conscience and consistency with the ethical purity of the laws of creation.
 
This is what the Bible god/Jesus commands or did:
 
Kills the firstborn humans and animals of the entire Egyptian nation and commanded that the event is celebrated yearly as Passover. (Exodus 12; 14; Romans 9:17)
 
Dwarfs, people with flat noses, those lame, with broken feet, unrounded corners of beards, and all people other than one race, the Jews (who, not so coincidentally wrote the Bible words), are in disfavor. (Leviticus 21; 29; Numbers 14:2)
 
People are condemned for ten generations if they have mutilated sex organs or are of illegitimate birth. (Deuteronomy 23:1-)
 
Kills people for making an ointment, burning incense, taking a census (75,000 slaughtered), for not cutting the ends of young boys' penises off, or eating fat. (Exodus 30:33; 2 Chronicles 26:19-;1Chronicles 21; Torah)
 
50,000 threescore and ten men are killed for looking in a box. (1Samuel 6:19)
 
Children were forced to wander and die in a wilderness for forty years because of the sins of the parents. (Numbers 14:33)
 
Killing unbelievers is commanded. (Deuteronomy 13; 2 Kings 10)
 
Children and their children, and a king who burned incense were condemned to leprosy. (2 Chronicles 26:19-)
 
Orders that young boys who disobey their parents or curse them be stoned to death. (Exodus 21:17; Deuteronomy 21:18-21)
 
Starved people, opened the earth to swallow them when they desired to eat, and then sent a plague to kill 14,700 more who complained about it. (Numbers 16)
 
Killed people for working or gathering sticks on the Sabbath, and for profaning it. (Numbers 15:32-36: Exodus 31:14,15)
 
Induced snakes to bite people and sent bears out of the woods to tear apart forty-two children who called a man "baldhead." (Jeremiah 8:18; 2 Kings 2:23,24)
 
Sent a famine that forced people to eat their children, and beheaded seventy innocent sons and put their heads in a pile as a lesson. (2 Kings 6:28-)
 
Tells men to kill their wives (even if pregnant), children, and friends if they disagree with them on religion, commands no mercy be given and is wrathful if lives are spared. (Deuteronomy 13:6-; Exodus 32:27)
 
Condoned Jael lying to a man and driving a tent peg into his temple while he slept. (Judges 4:17-21)
 
Is partial to one race and keeps them in good graces if they commit murder, bash babies to the ground, and rip open pregnant women. (Exodus 22:20; Hosea 13:16; Joshua 10:1-42; 1 Samuel 15:3)
 
Condones the practice of incest, adultery, genocide, sexism, keeping concubines (300 for Solomon), keeping and beating slaves (with the only limitation being to not injure their eyes or teeth). (Genesis 19; 20; 28; 29; Exodus 21; . . . throughout Torah)
 
Commands the killing of adulterers and non-virgins brought to marriage. (Deuteronomy 22:20-)
 
Commanded Jews to slaughter entire cities and to steal all their goods, kill and maim the animals, but keep alive the young virgin maidens to rape for their pleasure. (Deuteronomy 2:34; 3:6; 13; Judges 21; Numbers 31)
 
Equates love with having himself in the form of Jesus sacrificially tortured to death. Guilt for this is collectivized by demanding that all people be responsible for the torture that was necessary to make amends for an original sin for which all humans but Adam and Eve had no part, but for which all of humanity is condemned to eternal torture in hell if they don't agree. (Genesis 3; Romans 5:12,14;1John 1:8-10).
 
Christians, when confronted by such Bible atrocity, disassociate themselves by arguing that the Old Testament is figurative, or "old law," and not relevant to them. But the Bible itself says adding to or taking away from it is punishable by death. Also, Christians consider the god of the Old Testament to be the same as Jesus as part of the Trinity. No Christian would argue that their god and Jesus disagree on anything. So, what is attributable to god in the Old Testament is attributable to Jesus.
 
None of this is to say Jews and Christians have been uniquely cruel and barbaric. They simply reflected the moral landscape of their eras. The Jews lived amongst Persians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Greeks, Egyptians, and other ancient cultures; Christians lived among Romans and others in which beheadings, rape, pillaging, ripping tongues out, impaling, skinning alive . . . were common. It's important to note it was all done in the name of the respective gods. But this context does not excuse the immorality. Nor does it show the Bible god uniquely benevolent as commonly thought, much less consistent with the pure ethics and justice of the Creator.
 
Either the justice, ethics, and truth we see in the creation do not reflect its Creator, or the Bible is not of the Creator's hand.
 
As an aside, consider that Bible-based religions condemn the Muslim atrocities done in the name of Allah and the Koran. Yet the Bible god commands and does many of the very things Islamic statists do. That's because Islam is derived primarily from the Bible. If the Bible were practiced as commanded by its god/Jesus, all Jews and Christians would be committing the unspeakable injustice and barbarity of not only jihadists but the Bible itself.
 
Thomas Paine said he could believe no religion that would "shock the mind of a child," that "it is not a God, just and good, but a devil, under the name of God, that the Bible describes," and "there are matters in the Bible said to be done by the express commandment of God that are shocking to humanity and to every idea we have of moral justice."
 
George Carlin, the comedian, said in referencing the Bible: "Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man – living in the sky – who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time . . . But He loves you!"
 
Unfortunately, he, like about everyone else, and me for a time, mistakenly and unfairly equate holy books and religions with the Creator of the universe. I found no holy book that could live up to the truthful, logical, consistent, and just qualities evident in the creation and within conscience. I had to come to the inevitable conclusion that by failing those attributes, all human-made holy books prove themselves to be exactly what they appear to be, human-made, not Creator-made.