Regarding the Columbine High shooting, does anyone know anything about the possibility that the book SHE SAID YES is most likely based on a myth--i.e., it never happened. Apparently the police investigating the case have pieced together at time-line and the people who told the story of the Columbine girl shot for saying "yes" to the question "do you believe in God?" were no where near where she was killed. It has Christian martyr urban legend written all over it. I thought of this today during my book tour because that book is all over the place in every bookstore I enter.

Speaking of my book tour, one of the fun aspects of the process is talking to the media guides that drive you around the city from interview to interview. For example, the driver I had in Chicago had driven all the O.J. trial lawyers when all their books came out and she had some great stories (e.g., Marsha Clark told her she was in over her head and overwhelmed by the whole trial). But my media guide today in Portland, Oregon, had driven James Van Praagh around for a full day. She said it was obvious he was a total scammer. His purpose, as he told her over and over again, was to get his book on the New York Times bestseller list. She said that he was complaining that his publisher was not doing enough to promote his book, so he hired his own PR firm and went on the road for four months doing nothing but setting up signings at bookstores all over the country. Since no one knows the "secret list" of bookstores that the New York Times uses when they call each week to compile their bestseller list, you would have to blanket the country with as many local sales as possible. The Scientologists know this and they used to marshall the troops and purchase L. Ron Hubbard's books in order to get him on the bestseller list. (This was all documented in the L.A. Times six-part series on Scientology, where they actually had evidence from publishers who received shipments from the church with their own bookstore price stickers still on the books!--i.e., they didn't even bother to peel off the price tags!) My driver told me that Van Praagh poured down the coffee hour after hour, was wound up like a rubber band, and just kept talking about how he was going to be a big star and bestselling author. Well, it paid off, since both of his books have been on the list. Interesting to reinforce what I wrote about him in my book: he was an actor in search of a role, which he found in pretending to be a medium. The his audiences are only too willing to suspend disbelief long enough to buy into the scam.

This is from a subscriber to this internet hotline on the issue of believing in God but not in the immortality of the soul:

First of all, the Christadelphians (like some other small sects) believe that the majority of Christians are wrong. They feel that the rest of the Christians don't actually believe or know what the Bible really teaches. They believe that most of the "fundamental" teachings of Christianity were borrowed from the Greeks, and are not what the original church taught. The issue is that if the soul were unconditionally immortal, then if there were a punishment for not becoming a Christadelphian, it would be eternal, and likely conscious. However they deny that the Bible teaches such a thing as a literal, eternal hell. Christadelphians, to my knowledge believe that if a "pagan" (I suppose of a far distant land) were to die without hearing the gospel, that person would die, and cease to exist - ever. However, of those who have heard the gospel, some will believe, and some will not believe. When any of these people die, they too will cease to exist. None will yet be enjoying heaven, and none will be in hell. They will simply rot away until the resurrection. But their non-existence is temporary. At the end of time, both the unbelievers and believers will be raised again. At this time, Christ will judge them, and the believers will be granted immortality. The non-believers will then be subject to an annihilation brought on (I think) by fire. But this fire will not be a continual fire torturing them forever. The fire will burn them up, and they will cease to exist. So their punishment is the grief they will have at the end of time when they realize that the believers will live forever, and that they too could have had this. But now they will die, and never exist again.

This is just a brief outline as I remember it, and they have (as I indicated above) all kinds of Bible references that would seem to back up their ideas. Let me know if you are interested at all in this. Your correspondent may be able to find the Christadelphian teaching along with their grounds for this belief somewhere on the Internet.