Pennsylvania Driver Proves Religion Poisoned Her

When the late Christopher Hitchens penned one of his best selling and most controversial books “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” he said the title was meant to sound as brutal as it did. Because religious poison is at the bottom of some of the most idiotic things humans do when they let Bronze Age stories written by semi-literate goat herders dictate how they should live their lives. And when they believe they are under 24-hour surveillance by a supernatural agent who they think they can manipulate, it gets even worse.

Here is just the latest example of why religion is dangerous.

On January 7, 2020, near Weatherly, PA, Nadejda Reilly decided just reading the bible, praying, and going to church was not enough. She needed to put God to a test. The end result was nearly catastrophic when she deliberately drove into oncoming traffic and rammed another car with three people in it. She injured two of them as “a test” of her faith in that God. And it convinced her God passed her test with flying colors. 
Law enforcement authorities revealed that she showed no empathy for the injured people and no regret for her actions. When interrogated, the 31-year-old woman told investigator Trooper Bruce Balliet that she drove around the area ‘for several hours’ so this was premeditated. She claimed she was waiting for a sign or a calling from God but when she received nothing she decided to take matters into her own hands.

"Reilly related that God took care of her by not having her injured," wrote the investigator in an arrest affidavit. "Reilly expressed no concerns or remorse for the victims and stated she did not care if the other people were injured because "God would have taken care of them."

The injured were taken to the hospital for treatment. Reilly was charged with aggravated assault and other offenses and her $50,000 bail was also revoked as it was deemed she would do it again if given an opportunity.

While a verdict on Reilly is yet to be announced, her actions have been strongly criticized and Church leaders opined that her actions were not faith-based, but were delusional.

That begs the question: how can anyone say her actions were not faith-based? Do they know her mind? Do they know the depth of her faith and how she believes God works in her life? They immediately go to a “she’s delusional” excuse. They are correct about that - but she is delusional because of her faith, not in spite of it. She honestly "believes" -  because she has been indoctrinated since the time she was a young child to accept some adult's insistence that there is a sky daddy somewhere up there who performs magic. That is delusional. She believed some supernatural power would take control of her vehicle and guide it safely through traffic if she just had enough faith. That thinking almost got four people killed (Reilly and the three people in the car she rammed). Notice the woman never has to provide any evidence that those who survived were protected by a God. She just asserts it. That should not fly in any court in this country.

This is how religion, particularly Christianity in the United States, infects people to the point of trying to kill others and not caring about the end result because some God will take care of the collateral damage. It’s another version of the old blood-thirsty “Kill ‘em all...let God sort ‘em out” slogan.

This woman injured two people and didn’t give a damn because she believed that God would protect those she almost killed - if God loved them enough - so it wasn’t her problem. God saw to it she wasn’t injured, thus proving to her that God exists - in her mind. Obviously, God kept the others from being killed so what's the problem? There's no harm done.

Why is it religion seems to inflict stupidity on its believers? People do dumb things all the time but this woman's belief in her religion convinced her that ramming another car and walking away means God loves her. So the material and physical costs don't factor into how much love she just experienced. Nor, apparently, can she figure out a less destructive or less harmful way to test her faith. We can expect her to do this every time she drives, to see if God still loves her. (I wonder...what if God doesn’t care about the people she rams into next time? Should it be her call that they die that day all because she wants to test her faith in God?) Is this how God expects his flock to perform, by testing whether he’s paying any attention to them each moment? A God that ignores people is indistinguishable from a god that is imaginary.

Religious poison in Israel - The attack on the Gay Pride parade

Boy, do I miss Christopher Hitchens. I have read his book “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” seven times. Each time I gain greater insight into what he was telling the world. He did not suffer any religion quietly, tacitly or gladly, challenging all of us to see how and why it’s become a threat to the world, and continues to be the source of unadulterated hatred wherever it is found.

He would be having a field day with the latest news out of Israel.

Dateline Jerusalem July 30, 2015 – “An ultra-Orthodox Jewish man who had recently been released from prison after serving 10 years for stabbing participants in the annual Gay Pride Parade here in 2005 struck again Thursday, stabbing and wounding six marchers in this year’s parade, according to the police.

Yishai Schlissel 2015

After slashing and stabbing the six, the assailant, Yishai Schlissel, was pinned to the ground and arrested by police officers who were stationed along the route. Emergency services said two of the victims are in serious condition.

Yishai Schlissel 2005

In 2005, Schlissel told police that he was planning “to kill in the name of God” and that “such abomination cannot exist in Israel.” He was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to 12 years in prison. During that attack, police said that Schlissel dodged in between marchers, stabbing at random until he was pinned down by the police. The Israeli news media reported that he was released from prison three weeks ago.

If anything proves religion poisons everything, you can’t do much better than this. Schlissel stabs three people 10 years ago because in Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, the Talmud condemns sex between males with death. Three weeks after his release from serving a ten year prison sentence for the first crime, he does it again, only this time he wounds twice as many, with two still in serious condition as of this writing. Is anyone surprised an “ultra-orthodox” believer thinks he has the right to act as god’s executioner?

There isn't any.

“Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” Christopher Hitchens quoted that line so often he will eventually be given credit for the saying even though its originator is Dr. Steven Weinberg. Mr. Schlissel used his orthodox religious beliefs, which have been promoted as a profound good, to do something purely evil, yet he thinks he acted in the best interest of god. That’s an excuse any killer could use as justification for their action.

Every religion's God seems to love the sight of spilled blood.

This kind of religious poison isn’t anything new for Israel. Who can forget Dr. Baruch Goldstein who managed to gun down 29 Muslim worshippers and injure 125 others in the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre near Hebron on February 25, 1994 before being beaten to death by survivors? Yet even given the horror of that slaughter, at Goldstein's funeral, Rabbi Yaacov Perrin used it as an opportunity to claim one million Arabs are "not worth a Jewish fingernail". And what is it that separates Jews from Arabs? The belief that a god gave each side Palestine, all of it. Each sees the other as illegal occupiers. The poison of their religions will continue to kill thousands of people for the foreseeable future unless we finally realize that all religions…all of them…are man-made fairy tales and deserve no further attention, promotion, or endorsement in our societies. The sooner they are gone, the better off humankind will be.  

             Religions are not peaceful. They are mind control, even the pacifist ones. You surrender your free will to an ancient belief. And if that belief has an ancient book full of fairy tales, fake history, and mythical accounts that vilify another group of people, any "ultra-orthodox" interpretation of those passages will lead the reader to insist god meant for that group to be exterminated. Last week’s attack on a peaceful parade shows that Judaism is just as guilty as Christianity or Islam in warping a person’s behavior. 
           The problem with any religion is that the people who believe those myths want everyone to believe or abide by their myths too, and will go to any lengths to make that happen. The parade marchers, who were doing no harm to anyone, were assaulted with the intent to murder because years ago a parent or rabbi convinced Mr. Schlissel that some gobbledy-gook they read was god claiming He didn’t like those people, and since god wasn’t there to stab them himself, well….then it was up to Mr. Schlissel. For that reason, Mr. Schlissel should never see the outside of a prison cell again.