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.
If you’ve ever read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, you’ll remember the Eye of Sauron, … a giant flaming eye controlled by the “dark lord” Sauron, which allows him to watch anyone who puts on the fateful, power-giving ring at the novels’ center. Tomorrow, a real-estate company in Russia plans to install something resembling it (but without the magic powers, presumably) on the top of a 21-story building in Moscow. As the art installation will be only about three feet high, the effect should be slightly underwhelming — a bit like Spinal Tap’s mini-Stonehenge, perhaps — but that hasn’t prevented the Russian Orthodox Church from flying into a tizzy. Read more
Judging by the quality of the recording and the clothes and hairstyles of the worshipers, this video of an American preacher addressing his congregation could be some 30 years old. It just surfaced on YouTube the other day. It’s hard to fathom that anyone would sit through this voluntarily, without protest, and without bursting out laughing. But as we see towards the end, the pastor has his entire flock eating out of his hand. In any social setting but a religious one, what this man says, and how he says it, would likely be grounds for a mental evaluation. People would say, “I worry about him,” and “I feel terrible for his family,” or maybe “What’s the number for Bellevue?” In church, however, what’s objectively crazy stops being crazy. It doesn’t just become normal — it becomes vitally important and sacred and revered, and they’ll tell you that just about the worst thing you can do is laugh about it and mock it. Screw it, let’s laugh anyway: Read more
I borrowed that laugh-out-loud line from the aptly named Vice; the site has a story on Mormon-themed porn, claiming that it’s a booming business. Getting off on watching Mormons doing the dirty is a very specific taste, obviously, but catering to such niches is currently where the (porn) money is. The founder of the pay site Mormonboyz.com, the pseudonymous Legrand Wolf, … had his first locker-room experience at the Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah. … “Getting ready for my mission, I was finally exposed to [naked dudes] and I figured it out pretty quickly,” he told me. “But then I was around all these straight hot men, and I had to hide the fact that I was gay despite all this intimacy.” Wolf eventually had sex with his mission trip partner, which the Mormons suggestively enough call a “companion.” After months of dropped hints and excruciating build-up, Wolf’s sexy French partner finally put the moves on him and they developed a loving relationship. Although his former companion is now married with kids, Wolf says their affair — and the sexual tension leading up to it — changed his life. At the very least, it’s the inspiration for MormonBoyz.com, the only gay porn site that caters to some very specific religious fantasies. Read more
I hope Thomas Friedman is right: The Islamic State has visibly attracted young Muslims from all over the world to its violent movement to build a caliphate in Iraq and Syria. But here’s what’s less visible — the online backlash against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL, by young Muslims declaring their opposition to rule by Islamic law, or Shariah, and even proudly avowing their atheism. Nadia Oweidat, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, who tracks how Arab youths use the Internet, says the phenomenon “is mushrooming — the brutality of the Islamic State is exacerbating the issue and even pushing some young Muslims away from Islam.” Last month, BBC.com sounded a similarly optimistic note: “A growing social media conversation in Arabic is calling for the implementation of Shariah, or Islamic law, to be abandoned. Discussing religious law is a sensitive topic in many Muslim countries. But on Twitter, a hashtag which translates as ‘why we reject implementing Shariah’ has been used 5,000 times in 24 hours. The conversation is mainly taking place in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The debate is about whether religious law is suitable for the needs of Arab countries and modern legal systems. Friedman, for his part, also quotes the Moroccan activist Brother Rachid, an ex-Muslim who has embraced Christianity. Rachid’s YouTube address to President Obama is pretty excellent: Read more
Since 1978, Italy has had a law stating that every woman is guaranteed access to abortion within 90 days of getting pregnant. But that’s a paper promise, because guess what? Thanks to the vise grip the Catholic Church has on health care in Italy, Nine out of 10 obstetricians and gynaecologists working in public hospitals in some districts are now publicly refusing … to perform the procedure, reports the Independent. And so, In one case this year, 28-year-old Valentina Magnanti was left to give birth to a severely-malformed child in a hospital toilet in Rome because none of the doctors would treat her. The woman’s request for medically induced abortion had been granted. But after taking the drugs needed to induce the termination process, the hospital was unable to find willing medical and nursing staff to complete the procedure. One women’s advocate pointed out the cause of the problem: it has to do, she says, with … the influence of the Catholic Church on reproductive health, particularly in and around Rome where many major hospitals — although funded by the state — are owned and run by the Church, which determines hiring policy. Pope Francis came out in support of [anti-abortion] objectors earlier this year, giving fresh impetus to anti-abortion groups. Read more
