You can eliminate one piece of music from humanity's timeline. Which song do you nuke from orbit?

This will make people mad, and I'll probably delete it after the damage has been significant enough, but it really needs to be said.

Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen.

First of all, it's not a Christmas song, and it's not a Christian song, and the fact that it gets confused as such is proof that people listen to and even learn to sing songs without actually comprehending the lyrics.

Second, it combines the story of David and Bathsheba with Samson and Delilah, and this is very offensive not just to cultures and religions that honor these stories but also to pretty much every woman in the world, even those who apparently don't know these stories and so don't know that they should be offended. Delilah was a spy who used sex to get information from the enemy, and in doing so she betrayed a man who thought she loved him (even though he seriously should have known what she was up to after her previous failed attempts).

Bathsheba, on the other hand, was a victim, although she arguably might have had a hand in what happened to her. While her husband was at war, the king (also her husband's friend) decided to be a peeping tom, and he liked what he saw so much that he summoned her and had sex with her (the story is a bit unclear about whether she wanted it or just went along with it because he was the king). After, she went home, and they apparently didn't speak again until she sent him a message that she was pregnant. The king called her husband and tried to get him to go home, in the hopes that if he slept with his wife their little problem would go away. The husband wouldn't go home because he felt it was unfair when the other soldiers couldn't, so the king sent him with a message ordering the husband's commanding officer to have him killed and make it look like a casualty of war. In our society, a man who did that would be guilty of murder and sexual harassment. In their society, his punishment was the death of the son he had with Bathsheba. He also made a deal with Bathsheba that he would give her a second son and said son would become king (in other words, he paid her off), a deal she reminded him of when he was dying out of fear that one of David's older sons would be made king, instead. David's later redemption combined with the good he did prior to this incident doesn't make what he did to Bathsheba and Uriah any less wrong, and turning that around in a way that equates Bathsheba with Delilah and makes her look like she was a temptress whom David could not resist is wrong.

/r/AskReddit Thread