The Columbine Mass Shooting and the Myth of Cassie Bernall's Martyrdom

Mark D. Linville has published a short booklet with Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM) entitled, "Is Everything Permitted? Moral Values in a World Without God?" The booklet begins with the following statement by Linville:

Few news stories have had the profound effect on me as did the shooting rampage at Columbine High School.

Can you guess where this is headed? Linville continues:

As with the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the Challenger disaster, I can recall the exact circumstances of where I was and what I was doing when I learned the news. Time magazine reported that, in a kind of reverse inquisition, one of the killers held a gun to the head of a young girl and queried, 'Do you believe in God?' Certainly knowing the consequences of her words, she replied, 'There is a God. And you need to follow along God's path.' The gunman said, 'There is no God,' and squeezed the trigger. For many, this scene presents us with a gruesome snapshot of the moral nihilism that follows in the wake of the denial of God. If there is no God, can anything really be right or wrong? If there is no God, then do we even have the grounds for saying that the Columbine shooting was immoral or wicked?

There are, sadly, atheists who have killed theists just for being theists, but the Columbine gunman wasn't one of them. This is a myth which has been definitively debunked and yet there are even professional philosophers, like Linville, who are not immune to being duped by it. Many of the links in the prior sentence talk about how the myth has been refuted and yet it persists; multiple articles even excuse people who continue to believe the myth in spite of the evidence. For example, here is the Washington Post:

But the truth wasn't known, and now that it is, it barely reverberates. Even so, why does it matter? In questions of death and faith, it's the power of the story that counts, the tale that helps the mind grasp the unfathomable. Compared with that comfort, the truth is a trifle.

Now imagine if the myth said that a Baptist or an orthodox Jew killed an atheist for being an atheist. There would have been intense motivation to discredit the story and no one would be offering excuses for believing the myth in spite of decisive evidence against it. When it comes to reinforcing beliefs about the danger of atheism and/or atheists, however, perpetuating falsehoods is viewed as excusable.