Hello, fellow nonprofits and skeptics. Six individuals self identified as members of a
religious group called Soldiers of Christ have been arrested on murder charges in George's Gwyneth
County after a male, nourished woman was found dead in a cow trunk outside
of a spa. The victim, who had suffered weeks of abuse, was
discovered in distressing conditions. The suspects, including a fifteen year old, face
charges of felony murder, false imprisonment, tampering with evidence, and concealing a
death. Authorities believe the crime took place in the basement of a nearby home,
and the victim probably just moved here recently from South Korea to join the
religious organization. The investigation is ongoing and the victim's identity has not been disclosed.
This article is from CBS News and was published September sixth, twenty twenty
three. Infidel, Let's start with you. What do you got to say?
When I read this story, one of the first things that I thought
was, you know, I'm sure I'm not the only one on this panel
has been asked why you spend so much time talking about religions and gods?
You don't believe in But you know, out of the many reasons that I've
been given, this has demonstrated another one. I don't think a young person
deserves to be starved and killed and then left callously to decay in the in
the trunk of a car. I see this as a as an indicative of
religion dehumanizing its enemies. You know, the Bible and the Koran are just
two examples of how enemies are treated, and history is littered with these examples,
and I think that what we're seeing here with this group is just another
example of treating people's less than human. You know, I'm sure that most
Christians will react with you know, shock and horror, but they dehumanize people
every day. They talk about woke and LGBTQ plus community and other groups that
they deem unacceptable in a way that's really nothing less than demonization. You know,
they devalue people, they make them it's okay to not treat people like
humans. And sometimes they literally use religious rhetoric like demon possession or that other
people are devils. QAnon goes as as they call their enemies not human at
all. So this kind of hate, this kind of disregard for human life
is I think exactly what we're seeing come to the forefront with why are a
young woman who was found dead on a trunk of a car so callously Christian
shut n act shocked? What do they think is going to happen when they
treat other people like they shouldn't exist and they don't deserve things? You know,
what do they think this is going to end up as a sing along?
You know? To me, I just don't understand whether why this would
happen, but I can't be surprised. This is really what religion does.
It hurts and damages people. And Phoebea, I was wondering what your take
on this was. So it's alt to be fishy here. So they're identifying
the victim as Midsummer here, And if you're British or a fan of the
crimes of this world on dramatic television, we all know of Midsummer murders.
So for the purposes of this, imagine that I'm Dci Tombak and I'm here
with Gavin Troy sat next to me, and then George Bullard won further over,
and then Benjamin Jones Benjamin Jones in the corner and we're here to investigate
this murder in Georgia, and it's all a bit well fishy, it's weird
and just a bit unexplained. So much of this story is left out in
the open. Why was the woman here in the first place, Why are
the victim? Why they was the victim even in the United States at all?
And why is the age range of the people who have been arrested so
young. The youngest is fifty and the oldest is twenty six, and there
are six of them. This is an incredibly narrow range of ages, and
they're all South Korean men. And then it's all just a bit strange and
goes what because so much of this is just compounded and compounded and compounded on
top of itself that it just doesn't make any sense. Where was there this
done to her? Why was she in the back of a car? Why
was she so malnourished? And Jonathan, oh sorry, des Gavin Troy,
please take over. Gee. This is more than just a distressing story and
a horrible story. It kind of breaks my heart that somebody would be subjected
to this. But obviously something happened to entice her to come to this cult,
and you know, she was starved and beaten for weeks. How could
any human being do that to another human? I know we're not supposed to
dehumanize people, but this, you know, you know, after the search,
warmth was issued for the house where the suspect, one of the suspects,
I guess had. The place where this happened was in the basement of
his house. And I can't wrap my mind around, much less my emotions
around how this could happen and a neighbor didn't know. And I guess they
did talk to some neighbors and they said that, you know, the only
thing they knew about the people is they were very insular, and they would
occasionally and outside in the circle and talk to each other. But that's all
that he knew about them. He never heard or saw anything. Hang on
a minute, I'm going to jump in here. People always say this,
how did the neighbors not know? But to the panel here, do you
all know the names of your next door neighbors on both sides? Yes,
I do, and the ones across the word yes, and one across the
street yes? And how quickly did you know those names when you moved in?
Within three days? A couple of weeks at the most, I'm pretty
nosy. I want to point out that there is a sense of privacy in
the US in many places, and a lot of people don't know who their
neighbors are. That's pretty common here, and just the time I hear that,
I just go. But it's one of these things that harks back to
nineteen fifty's white picket fences, where everybody was a nosy neighbor and everybody had
a housewife that stayed at home, and everyone knew what was going on and
everyone else's business. Today, everyone does not know what's going on else everyone
else's business. And it's one of these things where, oh my god,
how should I should have known something? No, you shouldn't have known something,
because I value my privacy and my neighbors value their privacy. Yeah,
I know, I know their names. I don't know their occupations. I
don't know their ages, I don't know their middle names, I don't know
how long they've lived in the neighborhood. And well, I can understand not
only knowing their occupations because the guy who lives across from me, he's been
in and out of jobs, you know, about every three weeks since I've
known him the more a jack of all trades then than some of with you
know, jumping between trades. I don't know. But on that point though,
is that something we should be concerned about in society at large that allows
things like this to happen in suburbia. I think it is something that we
need to be concerned about. I don't think people need to be nosy neighbors
like Gladys on Bewitched. Sorry, you're really sure, Gladys Kravitz, I'm
all about it. I don't even know that even if you knew what was
going on, and some people would say something if anybody knows the story of
Kitty Genoviz that everybody learns that story in psychlee on one when you go to
college. But I mean there was people knew what was happening, and nobody
called the police. So I'm not even sure that even if people knew what
was happening, it would be reported. I mean, in Europe, some
prolific pedophiles have kept children in basements in suburban streets. Mm hmmm. And
I won't mention that happened in Belgium here because I don't want to give them
any any infamy here. But in countries like Belgium and in the Netherlands,
large pedophile rings have occurred in basements of middle class suburbia. Yeah, how
how do we as a society at large, where there are churches that are
behaving like this, there are the various individuals behaving like those described in the
low countries in Europe? What do we do to replace that sense of that
some people show to have been lost by the reduction in religiosity that used to
be Kelly, You know that that's a good question, and it's something that
I've talked about before. We we need to build a support network for atheists,
just like a church is a support network for theists. We when atheists
have a problem, they're suffering from an emotional or sometimes financial or you know,
any kind of mental problem, they don't have anybody to turn to,
and we really need to build that community. That's one of the things that
I'm really thankful of the ACA for is that it's helping to build that community.
We try to do that over on the discord server too, So I
think you're right, we need to we need to have that for our community.
It seems to me that Korea is like a hotbed for weird religious Christian
cults, and I wanted to look into that because I thought it was weird
that all these weird place things were coming out of South Korea. And I
found that Christianity has really been expanding rapidly and pretty quickly in South Korea ever
since World War Two. Well, I have to at the end of World
War two, about two percent of the population was Christian, and in twenty
fifteen it was nearly thirty percent. And there's a and this might help you
understand some of what was going on here. There's a movement there called min
Jung theology, which these moonees pardon, are these moonies? No, no,
no, this is not Mooney's. But it's something that it's not it's
something that's even picked up by the Catholic Church in Korea. It combines the
idea that God made men in his image with this Korean ideal of what they
call han and it doesn't translate well into English, but it denotes a feeling
of inconsolable pain and hopelessness. So it's it's basically, it's the acceptance of
God. And since you are the image of God, you will no longer
have to suffer with Han. So that's that's the attractiveness to this people,
people who are living still in a negrarian society within a second World nation,
and they've suffered their whole lives like their parents did and their grandparents. The
history of Korea in the last hundred years is not pretty. So there is
this desperation there and this this idea that Christianity is going to solve that desperation.
Infidel, you want to add to it, you know, when it
comes down to creating community and removing this privacy problem, because it is beyond
privacy. And I understand and appreciate privacy at least to a sense, but
mister exactly. But at the same time, there it is important to know
what's going on around you, and I think that we've kind of gotten away
from that and to a point of we've run from one bubble to the other.
We run from our vehicle to inside to work. You know, it's
always we're not really interacting, and I do think that's a loss overall.
I think that that only enables people with the worst intentions. We're seeing here
obviously as people who the kids and for the lack of a better way to
put it, the young, young, young people who were charged with this.
I mean, they didn't just wake up one day and end up here.
There's a path that led this, and there's a path of belief in
somebody who led them in a very wrong direction and they ran with it.
It doesn't remove their their responsibility from it, it doesn't take away their their
part in this. But I think that South Korea is one of those places
that is not well inoculated as well as some places are against some of the
Christian doctrines that they they're new to them. There's something different, and I
think that that's unfortunately one of the things that's caused that appeal. But as
far as how do we get around it, I've got to be straightforward.
I don't know. But one thing I do know is that it's important for
Christians to understand that they can't look at this as just something isolated. This
is an operating procedure that we see time and time again of people making really
bad choices inside of religious groups. And until they own it, they're going
to continue to run from it, deny it, and it's going to keep
happening. It's not going to just disappear. And if they you know,
as many things as they throw under that rug and pretend it's not there,
It's still there. They can pretend it's not there. But the bigger that
mountain gets, the harder and harder it gets to ignore. And that's what
I'm really hoping that some of these things, it's really nothing to be gained
from some young woman being dead in the back of a car. And I
hope that one thing that people can take from this, though, is maybe
we should step back and not be so easy to excuse people when they have
bad behaviors, being oh, they were just under the influence of brainwash,
Jonathan, you had anything else to say about that might take cults make monsters
out of people. They probably didn't start wanting to be this way at all.
Most people, I believe tend to want to be good, or at
least want to be the hero of their own personal movie. That's what their
internal dialogues tell anyway, I know mine does. But they're not originally willing
to do unspeakable acts against people who no longer with no regard to the law,
with no compassion at all, basically almost psychopathic lack of caring or feeling
for another human being. In the name of some religious principle. And I
can think of a lot of instances of this, especially most recently in various
countries around the world, from various religions, of doing pretty unspeakable, horrible
things to a person just for a religious or a traditional belief. And these
things make people this way. They take their inbred need for belonging and compassion
for other people and strip it down and then create a monster. That's what
happened here. Six young people whose brains weren't even fully formed are now encoded
with this kind of bs. It's going to be very long road if they
ever climb out from under it, but you know, hopefully a very long
jail sentence will do it. But this kind of thing makes me reconsider my
opposition to the death penal. And so I just have to use a mantra
that a friend of mine when I was in high school gave me, Why
do we kill people? Who kill people? Prove killing people is wrong?
I just say that over and over again. Maybe somebody can tell me why
people like this have the right to live. People who would throw somebody that
question because the state does not have the right to engage in the killing of
its citizens. Full stop. The state does not have that right. And
just because somebody has killed somebody does not entitle somebody else to kill them.
Just like if somebody steals my car, I do not have a right to
go and steal their car. I don't know if their car is a better
car. So I agree with you. I agree with you. But you
know, when I when I read things like this, it just it puts
me in a little bit of a bad, bad attitude, you know,
and be the bigger person. Oh, you have to get into that base
instinct of revenge. That's why I keep chanting to myself, why do we
kill people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong? And that's
basically where I'm at. We shouldn't be doing that, and I don't think
under any certain stance, you know. So it's uh, the state should
never have the ability to do that. But Kelly, and I agree with
you. Still, Kelly, what did you go to say? I wanted
to check out the Soldiers of Christ a little bit because I wanted to find
out who they were. They do have a website out of Columbia. It's
completely down right now. It says they're going public on October first, I
don't know if that's had anything to do with what's going on with this case,
but I suspected might. One thing I have to wonder about too,
and it was something that nobody brought up. This look, this was we
all meant into how young these guys were, and it made me wonder if
this was just like a gang of villains who were just using the soldiers and
crisis upfront to lure this young woman over here. And did they have plans
to do this more more had they already done it? That's something that I
want to know. History has shown us that people have used religion to take
advantage of and hurt people throughout I mean, it's been going on for thousands
of years, and so I got it, and I have to wonder if
that if them using the religion was just the front A little bit of trivia
though. I was talking to a member of the ACA and they told me
that not only do they live right near this spot, but it's also right
next to the mall where the show of Stranger Things was filmed. It doesn't
really mean anything to your story, but it was a cool bit of trivia.
Fidi well Dci Tom Barnaby here looking out all of the evidence. I've
got absolutely no bloody idea what's going on here. If you have any idea,
please let us know. But for more from the nonprofits click here.