I remember reading in the news that one of those crazy guys who went into a school with a gun and started shooting people asked a few of them, “Does God exist,” threatening to shoot them if they said yes. Some of them said yes anyway (and he shot them), so it looks like this method isn’t going to stop people from believing in God.
The idea of a physical threat is the same; but the social context is radically different—the school shooters were asking their victims to give up their tribal allegience under circumstances similar to historical threats. Ideally, this question would be posed under conditions which divorced epistemic state from tribal identity as much as possible.
I remember reading in the news that one of those crazy guys who went into a school with a gun and started shooting people asked a few of them, “Does God exist,” threatening to shoot them if they said yes. Some of them said yes anyway (and he shot them), so it looks like this method isn’t going to stop people from believing in God.
That could be an urban legend—it’s the sort of story that martyr-happy adherents would be likely to fabricate and spread, and the story I find searching online (Columbine) only has one person asked that question, and after being shot.
But cooperative sources quickly clammed up when questioned about the most celebrated Columbine story of all, immortalized this month in Misty Bernall’s bestseller, “She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall.” “This is just too sensitive,” a key source said, insisting on anonymity even for that statement. According to Misty Bernall’s book, which has energized Christian youth movements around the world, the killers put a gun to her daughter Cassie’s head and asked if she believed in God. When she said yes, they blew her away.
But while no one would go on the record, key investigators made it clear that an alternate scenario is far more likely: The killers asked another girl, Valeen Schnurr, a similar question, then shot her, and she lived to tell about it. Schnurr’s story was then apparently misattributed to Cassie.
Wyant is the only living person who actually witnessed Bernall’s death. She was hiding beneath a table right beside Cassie when it happened. “Emily was right there next to her, and in fact, she was looking right in her eyes, so you’d think she would be able to hear that, being right next to her, if anything was exchanged. And she can’t remember anything being said,” Wyant explained.
and this:
Salon News reported last Thursday that investigators believed the famous exchange actually took place between Klebold and Valeen Schnurr, and was mistakenly attributed to Bernall. Now Schnurr herself has confirmed that story. On Tuesday the Denver Post reported her account, which she also told to Salon News:
Schnurr was down on her hands and knees bleeding, already hit by 34 shotgun pellets, when one of the killers approached her. She was saying, “Oh, my God, oh, my God, don’t let me die,” and he asked her if she believed in God. She said yes; he asked why. “Because I believe and my parents brought me up that way,” she said. He reloaded, but didn’t shoot again. She crawled away.
I remember reading in the news that one of those crazy guys who went into a school with a gun and started shooting people asked a few of them, “Does God exist,” threatening to shoot them if they said yes. Some of them said yes anyway (and he shot them), so it looks like this method isn’t going to stop people from believing in God.
The idea of a physical threat is the same; but the social context is radically different—the school shooters were asking their victims to give up their tribal allegience under circumstances similar to historical threats. Ideally, this question would be posed under conditions which divorced epistemic state from tribal identity as much as possible.
That could be an urban legend—it’s the sort of story that martyr-happy adherents would be likely to fabricate and spread, and the story I find searching online (Columbine) only has one person asked that question, and after being shot.
No, I read it at the time of the event, in the regular news, although I don’t remember the details well enough now to find it again.
That could be Columbine. In an earlier Salon article talking about the investigators preparing their report:
...and the article I linked previously followed up with this:
and this: