What would you say to a killer?

[smead2942]

Knowing your life on this earth hangs in the balance, what would you say if a killer with a gun asked what religion you belonged to?

If you are a Christian, would you admit it knowing that you might die for your answer, or would you deny it to live on for the sake of your family? This is a tough question for me. I would hope I could do the former. Some of those Christians in Oregon had to decide and some died for their faith rather than deny that Jesus Christ is their Lord. I think they are modern day martyrs.

cnn.com/2015/10/02/us/oregon-umpqua-community-college-shooting/index.html

Viva Cristo Rey.

 

[GEddie]

This is a really great question. If I had been in that situation, I am not sure what I would have done. I will now pray that if I had been encountered by this situation, I would stand up for my belief.

I also think that something needs to be done in these schools to prevent this. I heard someone say that all people should be allowed to have a gun at a college. I think this is absurd, because those who are mentally ill and planning to commit suicide afterwards, obviously don’t have an concern with their own life.

That is the issue du jour at my own school, UT Austin. Previously, firearms had been banned there (since the world-notorious Tower Sniper incident in 1966). In two generations since then, no firearm violence had occurred there.

Now the state is requiring that firearms be welcomed there (dorms, classes, etc).

Sounds to me like a classic governmental case of “if it ain’t broke, break it.”

I grieve for the next person who will die because a disgruntled “flunkee” armed himself before melting down.

ICXC NIKA.

 

[SMH_2015]

I have thought about this many times (if you recall, one of the Columbine shooters asked a girl in the library “Do you believe in God?” before shooting her; she said yes). I would like to hope & pray that I would have the strength to say YES, I am a Christian!! without hesitation. But as others have pointed out, it’s easy to say when the gun isn’t pointed at you.

As for gun control, for the record, I think it’s mostly stupid. I lived in VT for almost 20 years where there are few murders & almost no gun control. The *really *stupid thing is having an un-armed “security guard.” But I believe this is going completely OT.

 

[badnewsbarrett]

Knowing your life on this earth hangs in the balance, what would you say if a killer with a gun asked what religion you belonged to?

If you are a Christian, would you admit it knowing that you might die for your answer, or would you deny it to live on for the sake of your family? This is a tough question for me. I would hope I could do the former. Some of those Christians in Oregon had to decide and some died for their faith rather than deny that Jesus Christ is their Lord. I think they are modern day martyrs.

cnn.com/2015/10/02/us/oregon-umpqua-community-college-shooting/index.html

It depends on the exact situation, but in that particular situation, this is what I would say.

I would point out that this is a community college, not a seminary, and we are here to develop critical and independent thinking skills, we’re not working on being puppets.

I would also point out that most of us were raised around some type of religion and we are just now starting the process of making some decisions for ourselves, and most of us are likely to be using these different levels of freedom and space to drift away from what we grew up with and look into some other things. Just between us, I’ll point out that this is extremely plausible and it really does happen all the time, but I’m not going to say that in front of a killer. Instead, I might look around at everyone else and say “Right everybody? Isn’t that what we’re doing?” I would sincerely hope that everyone would have the common sense to think “Sure, I’m a college student and that sounds just like me, also I would like to live today.”

If I were pressed to say what my own religion is, I wouldn’t necessarily lie, but I would try very hard to say things that keep me alive. For example;

Killer: What about you, what is your religion? Are you a Christian?

Me: I guess my religion is the truth, I believe in seeking the truth. Probably about the same as you, I was raised in some form of religion like almost everyone around here but now I’m just starting to explore things on my own and I’m looking for the truth. You’re probably further along but I think we’re going through the same process.

Killer: What is the truth? What is your truth? Or something along those lines. Is Christianity the truth?

Me: I’ve been exploring some interesting sources outside of traditional organized religion, there’s some critical scholarship that I’ve been looking into and it’s raising some issues that I was never exposed to when I was growing up. But I’m just starting that process, I have a long way to go. It would really help if I was able to live long enough to continue finding out about all of this. What I do know is (here I could start talking about Bultmann and demythology, Ellegard and the Jesus Myth theory, Ehrman and textual corruption, Gunkel and form criticism, Lemche and biblical minimalism, Welhausen and the documentary hypothesis, maybe even a little bit of Thomas Paine or Thomas Jefferson or Spinoza). If there are any glaring holes in my knowledge, that’s because I’m just getting started with this and I am working on it. And aren’t we all working on seeking the truth, everybody? Everybody nod your head and agree that the truth is good so we can live, please.

And that would be my general strategy, assuming that I hadn’t found a heavy object to hurl at him within the first handful of seconds of him being in the room. If it did somehow come down to answering those questions, though, that’s how I would do it. I would say things that are plausible and fairly likely to make him think it actually might be a bad idea to kill these people. Granted, I would have no way of knowing exactly what he believes, but who really has a problem with “the truth”? Who doesn’t believe in seeking after the truth? I sincerely think that even the most unstable psychopath would think twice about killing someone if they believe that person truly wants to seek the truth, has the humility to know they don’t know everything about the truth yet, and they’d be willing to believe whichever truth is the right one if it’s properly presented.

Most of that is not completely true of my own personal experience, but then I didn’t go to a community college, I went to a private Evangelical school that has a seminary. If it happened there, I’m not sure what I would do, none of this would be nearly as plausible. At a community college, though, this should work pretty well.

But I would certainly hope that we would be able to distract and/or attack the gunman before he could control the room and line people up for execution.

If I do get killed for saying that, I don’t think I feel too bad. I might have gotten as far as feigning admiration for critical scholarship that I do not in fact agree with, but I wouldn’t plan on straight out denying Christ. I would imagine that I would actually die on account of changing the conversation and not getting with the decided-upon program, while talking about how important it is to seek the truth. Am I ashamed of misleading a killer by saying positive things about the pursuit of truth? No, not really, I don’t think I am ashamed of that. I feel pretty comfortable with taking this particular route in order to give myself and some other people a marginally better chance of staying alive.

 

[arthra]

Knowing your life on this earth hangs in the balance, what would you say if a killer with a gun asked what religion you belonged to?

If you are a Christian, would you admit it knowing that you might die for your answer, or would you deny it to live on for the sake of your family? This is a tough question for me. I would hope I could do the former. Some of those Christians in Oregon had to decide and some died for their faith rather than deny that Jesus Christ is their Lord. I think they are modern day martyrs.

cnn.com/2015/10/02/us/oregon-umpqua-community-college-shooting/index.html

I respect the young people in Oregon who answered that they were Christians…

You’ll recall that the Apostle Peter denied he knew Jesus…

A servant girl saw him seated there in the firelight. She looked closely at him and said, “This man was with him.” But he denied it. “Woman, I don’t know him,” he said.%between%

In Shiah Islam there is a provision that if your life is in danger you can dissimulate your Faith…It’s called Taqiyya.

See:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taqiya

Baha’is are forbidden to use Taqiyya and if asked cannot dissimulate their Faith.

 

[Doormouse]

nothing, I would let the “smell” do the talking…

its a hard one… I have stood up against anti Christian values before, battered and bruised, little bloody but I gave as good as I got… but a killer is totally different.

 

[AnneElizabeth]

A big whopping NO to what you say here. Absolutely not. This is not freedom, its not even smart. It would do NOTHING to solve the problem. In fact, I GUARANTEE YOU it would do everything to perpetuate it.

Have you read how many times people on just this message board accuse others of being ‘nutters’ (in a nice way of course… i.e. “I think my MIL has a personality disorder”, that ‘crisis line’ would get more calls than it could possibly handle, not only that, you are breeding a social web of distrust based on probably nothing more than hysteria… very bad news. Not to mention the foolish belief that these types of ‘welfare checks’ would not be abusive themselves. One would hope they are not, but I"ve heard some real horror stories. What ever happened to the land of the free? Now its the land of the desperately paranoid and foolish.

 

[drac16]

I’m confident that I would be honest and say that I’m a muslim. However, I don’t know that. It’s real easy to claim that I would behave a certain way, it’s another thing to do it. May God give me Grace if it ever happens. My faith is absolutely central to my identity, so it’s not something I can compromise on.

 

[Starwarsfan2]

I’d try to by God s grace to say " I am a Christian , and I forgive you "

 

[Reuben_J]

I don’t know the whole situational make up, but it sounded like he took several people together into one room.

This might sound crazy, I know people panic, and I can’t say for sure what I would do in this situation, but I just wonder if he had five or ten people together in a room, and he had enough time to ask them all their religious affiliation, why in the world didn’t anyone try to rush him? If five or ten people descended on him together, he may not have killed as many as he did.

Don’t think I’m some crazy action movie fanatic, I’m not. I acknowledge the extreme danger in such an act, but in the face of certain death, and the death of those nearby, one should resolve to do something.

I think this is important to talk about what we would do, not what we would say.

I know you speak in retrospect but what you are suggesting is what many people are wary of - that some religious lunatic does something crazy. As long as there is potential for life, we must not give up hope that it can be saved. We may never know, but the correct word that is being used, could in a way, change the heart of the mad man, a would-be mass murderer. What would the word may be? That would be the difference in a Christian believer compared to the non-believer.

As it is a hypothetical, I do not know what I would say, but probably there is not much time to think, and therefore would have to be dependent on what the Holy Spirit prompt me to say. IOW, I have to depend on my conscience at that spur of the moment.

 

[kimg901]

1st, he better be quicker on the draw than me. 2nd, if it were to happen I would tell this person what I am and ask God to forgive him/her.