Purpose driven surrender

When I first heard of the Atlanta courtroom shooting, and the OJ-like getaway, I wondered how this guy could just get away, and I remember thinking how his life would surely end in death.

It didn't.

A woman he held hostage, one Ashley Smith, somehow managed to connect to Brian Nichols on a human level, and he finally surrendered peacefully to authorities. She used her one chance at survival to give Nichols one chance at retrieving his humanity. One often-talked about detail is that she read a chapter from a devotional book, The Purpose Driven Life, to calm him down.

I've never read this book, but what the stories asserts about it is something I've long felt to be true - it is more important to do Christianity than to believe Christianity, or as St. James would say, "Faith without works is dead."

Ron Reagan Jr. blogged about this. One of his correspondents wrote, "God is a myth believed in only by the irrational, and since both of these people believed in the myth, she got through to him."

Aside from the poor didactic reasoning (the unprovable assertion regarding God's non-existence), there's actually a point here - she got through to him. The most important thing to understand about empathy is that you only have it if you reach people where they already are. Lecturing this man from a distant place would have gotten Smith killed. Though I believe in natural selection, I had to laugh when I read some satire website jesting about how well Smith could have done with 'Origin of the Species.' Reaching Nichols where he already was saved his life, and hers.

There are worse crimes than spreading hope, and worse ills than offering a chance at redemption. I admire Ashley Smith for seeing that so clearly.