RE: Was Samson a moron, or does beguiling actually work?
January 27, 2015 at 11:09 am
(This post was last modified: January 27, 2015 at 11:26 am by Jenny A.)
(January 25, 2015 at 3:44 pm)Rhythm Wrote: Moral: Women are untrustworthy.
Oh we are, we are.
(January 25, 2015 at 5:04 pm)professor Wrote: Sampson is the story of most of us.
He got sucked in to the allure of a worldly babe.
The devil has something for everyone.
The three G's get a lot of guys: Girls / Gold and Glory.
Sammy did ignore the warning not to involve with those kind of relationships with the tribes around him, he got clues from Delilah that he ignored, so he cooked his own goose.
He only got beguiled by being where he ought not to be.
A lesson for us all.
Ah, not just women, but foreign worldly women are bad news.
(January 25, 2015 at 3:34 pm)IanHulett Wrote: I'm reading the story of Samson and Delilah while watching DarkMatter2525 on YouTube, because as I'm a Skeptic, I try to ask questions and see evidence for myself whenever possible, in Darkmatters case I like to make sure he's not strawmanning the living hell out of the bible. Which so far, no, he isn't. The bible really is that fake.
In my old catholic bible, they tell Delilah to "beguile" Samson to get the secret to his weakness(Judges 16:5), and after I read that, I looked up "beguile" which means charm or enchant (someone), sometimes in a deceptive way. Can beguiling really cause someone to do what Samson did in Judges 16:17? Or was Samson just a moron who deserved what he got for being stupid? Thanks a bunch.
It's a folk story, like much of the OT. They can be fun, or weird, or culturally reveling. What they aren't generally is a good recipe for moral choices. That Sampson got tricked while being head over heals in love, isn't surprising. But carrying his strength in his hair, now that's odd.
The Bible isn't the only place to find weird stories. The Spartan boy who let a fox eat his belly rather than admit to stealing it from an enemy camp is a case in point. It's a weird silly story. What possible punishment could be worse than being eaten to death by a fox?
Find me a culture, I'll find you a dozen weird "lesson" stories. George and the Cherry Tree gets odder the more you think about it.
The truly odd thing about the tales in the Bible isn't that they are implausible and many of the lessons at odds with modern thinking. What's really odd is the Christian/Jewish assumption that they must be profound and worth revering in a way that we don't revere the fox or cherry tree stories. They have all the marks of myth and folk tales and should be treated as such.
If there is a god, I want to believe that there is a god. If there is not a god, I want to believe that there is no god.
