Samson: Bible Hero or Terrorist
Since
leaving Christianity, I have become acutely aware of the strange disconnect
that believers have with the violent acts of the Bible. It seems that no matter how horrid the
atrocity, once sugar-coated with divine approval, Christians swallow it quite
easily. Another factor in Christians’ blithe
acceptance of violence is that the blood-soaked events in the Bible have been depersonalized
and spiritualized; reduced to mere props in service of religious lessons. Empathy for the suffering in stories such as
the worldwide destruction of living creatures in the flood story, the killing
of the Egyptian firstborn, and the genocidal stories of Canaanite conquest is
pretty much absent from the thinking of the average Christian.