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.
No, this is not a story from Lahore or Riyadh. Welcome to Jacksonville, Florida. Jacksonville City Council President Clay Yarborough objected Wednesday to a photo of a nude pregnant woman at the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, saying it “works against our efforts to promote a family-friendly Jacksonville and downtown.” Won’t somebody please think of the widdle cheel-drunn!!! Yarborugh says that he photo is so unpalatable, and exhibiting it so irresponsible, that the museum should suffer financial consequences to the tune of almost… Read more
In your literary wanderings, you may have come across this quote, attributed (perhaps wrongly) to the Greek philosopher Epicurus: Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God? The Epicurean paradox is an early version of the problem of evil — why an all-powerful deity does nothing to prevent it. Pondering the problem of evil is challenging enough when good people suffer. It’s worse when good people suffer and the perpetrators barely do (or not at all). And it becomes excruciating when this happens: Read more
Rick Santorum hasn’t given up dreaming about the presidency, and this time he’s extra-serious, he says. Where he had to build his operation from the ground up in 2012, Santorum now has a grass-roots operation called Patriot Voices, which boasts 150,000 activists across the country. … He is retooling his message, hoping to appeal beyond his socially conservative base and reach blue-collar voters who are being left behind in the economy. “I don’t think I’ve met a ‘suit’ yet,” Santorum said of his travels around the country. … That is a theme he has sounded for years, though it often got overlooked in the 2012 campaign, where most of the attention was on Santorum’s culture warrior credentials. “Part of what I had to do last time was lay out my bona fides” on moral and social issues, Santorum said. “That’s done.” Mediaite, under the headline “Rick Santorum Announced He’s Running For President and Nobody Noticed,” writes that Santorum’s declaration about entering the 2016 race “landed with a thud.” The candidate claims that he likes it that way, so he can be the come-from-behind underdog. Read more
Offending the religious sensibilities of Buddhists could land you in jail. For two years. A New Zealand bar manager has been detained in Burma for using an image of the Buddha wearing headphones in a promotion. Police said the promotion was an insult to the Buddhist religion. General manager Philip Blackwood, 32, who hails from Wellington; owner Tun Thurein, 40; and manager Htut Ko Ko Lwin, 26, were detained for police questioning yesterday and the bar was shuttered after a complaint by an official from Myanmar’s Religious Department, police said. The Facebook posting for the newly opened V Gastro bar, a tapas restaurant and nightclub in a Yangon embassy area, showed a psychedelic mock-up of the Buddha wearing DJ headphones to trail a cheap drinks night this Sunday, AFP reported. Something like this, I gather: Read more
As much as I appreciate and sometimes admire the work of think tanks and advocacy groups, I’m automatically a bit leery of what they have to say. If your job is, for example, to advocate against sexual violence, and the time comes to write your organization’s annual report, you’d probably have a hard time concluding that things are getting better instead of worse. Understandably, perhaps, you’d look at one set of sexual-assault stats (let’s say, the National Crime Victimization Survey, which claims that the incidence of rape is relatively low), and you might decide that the Department of Justice Campus Sexual Assault Study, which proclaims rape to be almost epidemic, better fits what you believe to be the truth. This confirmation bias is all around us (there are no doubt instances of it on this very site). Whatever the statistical trend, I don’t think you’ll ever hear Greenpeace executives say that this year, humankind has made great strides in avoiding ecological disaster. Nor are you likely to hear the folks at the American Enterprise Institute touting studies that show that the government has shrunk, and that the free market is on an inexorable upswing. Too much is wrapped up in continuing the narrative that things are, from the organization’s standpoint, getting worse. A good dose of pessimism, whether warranted or not, does at least six internally beneficial things: Preserves the ideological message within the organization (“we’re fighting the good fight”); Makes its workers and followers more cohesive (“we’re all in this good fight together”); Makes workers and followers more motivated (“the organization needs my moral and intellectual support”); Helps greatly with fundraising (“the organization needs my financial support”); May therefore allow the organization to grow its payroll or projects, or both; Increases the organization’s access to news media (because bad news “sells” better than good news). This little riff is not meant to disparage the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), which yesterday released a 539-page report — the real subject of this post — on how the rights of non-religious people are under increasing attack. Read more
