“The hadith are full of inhumane and absurd material. I do not think they can be taken as true.”

This objection is almost always made in the abstract, and it collapses the moment specifics are supplied.

The hadith corpus is not a single undifferentiated body of claims. It is a graded literature, and the grading is the entire point. Muslim scholars developed ulum al-hadith (the sciences of hadith) precisely because they took the problem of forged and unreliable reports seriously, centuries before anyone raised it as a polemic. A report is assessed by its matn (text) and its isnad (chain of transmission), and it is classified accordingly.

That machinery does real work. Take the report about monkeys stoning another monkey for adultery, which circulates as a showcase absurdity. Read it in the collection and the speaker is a Companion, describing what he witnessed and believed before Islam, during the age of ignorance. The report is mawquf (stopped), meaning it traces to a Companion and not to the Prophet. It is not a saying of the Prophet, it is not ascribed to him, and it cannot ground a ruling. The absurdity is being reported, not endorsed.

Somebody quoting that report as a scandal has either not opened the science, or is relying on you not opening it.

This is not a claim that every report in every collection is beyond discussion, and Muslims have argued about individual traditions for a very long time. It is a claim that "the hadith are full of nonsense" is a conclusion reached by skipping the field that exists to answer it. Bring a specific hadith. It can be examined.