Terry Firma, though born and Journalism-school-educated in Europe, has lived in the U.S. for the past 20-odd years. Stateside, his feature articles have been published in the New York Times, Reason, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Wired. Terry was the founder and Main Mischief Maker of Moral Compass, a now-dormant site that pokes fun at the delusional claim by people of faith that a belief in God equips them with superior moral standards. He was the Editor-in-Chief of two Manhattan-based magazines until he decided to give up commercial publishing for professional photography... with a lot of blogging on the side. These days, he lives in an old seaside farmhouse in Maine with his wife, three kids, and two big dogs.
A child-rape investigation is underway in Kiryas Joel, an Orthodox-Jewish shtetl of about 23,000 people, located halfway between New York City and Poughkeepsie. The FBI-led probe centers on the alleged misconduct of Rabbi Moshe Hersh Klein, the principal of the town’s religious elementary school. The New York Times reports that a controversial video has emerged, showing Rabbi Klein, the gray-bearded principal of the yeshiva’s third, fourth and fifth grades, his legs around a pupil who appears to be about 8, patting the boy and kissing his cheeks, and rocking him for several seconds. Read more
If there were a hell, I think Mother Teresa would be a perfectly fine candidate. But not because she simply chose the wrong religion. Fundamentalist Baptist pastor Steven Anderson thinks it makes perfect sense that only his kind of Christians will sit at Gods’ feet for eternity, content in the knowledge that, meanwhile, heretics like the Albanian nun will burn in the lakes of fire. And to illustrate his point, he does two impressions of Mother Teresa in this video, at 0:46 and 0:58. Read more
Last September, Luke Adrian Cooke was extradited from Albania after having eluded U.S. law enforcement since 2007. Cooke, a former youth pastor, was wanted for sexual assaults on an 8-year-old boy and a 16-year-old boy between 2003 and 2006. His stealth tour of the world took him to China, Spain, Morocco, and, finally, Albania, where his luck ran out. Read more
This is as grim and heart-tearing a story as you’ll ever read on Friendly Atheist, its emotional impact no less for having taken place far away, in Australia. There are days when I hate what I feel compelled to write about — all this violence and hypocrisy can severely darken my mood — and I just want to go play with my kids and hug them tight. Consider that your trigger warning. A Christian hip-hop music producer who murdered his girlfriend’s intellectually disabled son following months of “cruel, degrading and inhumane” abuse has been sentenced to 42 years jail. Kodi Maybir, 32, claimed the little boy, Levai, had fallen off a pogo stick inside the music studio where the family lived in Oatley, in Sydney’s south, in May 2013. Read more
According to the satirical website Political Garbage Chute, God’s Only Son gave a press conference over the weekend, clarifying the heavenly stance on bathrooms for trans people, and issuing an 11th Commandment that will be faxed “to all Christian churches in the U.S. by the end of the summer.” “We were hoping that it wouldn’t come to this,” Christ said, “but watching our people get so heated and angry over transgender people’s bathroom choice just made us too apoplectic to do nothing this time. So we’re unveiling, for the first time in a long, long, long time, a new commandment. Number 11. Thou shalt just poop and get out, weirdos.” Read more
