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.
The Salvation Army loves serving the son of God. Other sons, not so much. The Johnson City Salvation Army… turned away a homeless family with a teenage son on a cold night earlier this month, all because of the boy’s age. Tim Lejeune says on one of the coldest nights of the year [temperature 18ºF], despite the organization’s white flag waving outside the shelter [a symbol that all are welcome], the Salvation Army turned his family away, because his son is 15 years old. “They said he’s too old to stay on the women’s side, because of the women running around in their pajamas, and they said he’s too young to stay on the men’s side in case some pervert wants to do whatever,” Lejeune said. Lejeune says his wife, their 15 year-old son, 16 year-old daughter and five year-old son, all down on their luck, have been living in their car for the last several weeks. Thanks to the charitable offer of a local motel, the Lejeunes found free temporary lodging, and police officers who’d heard of the family’s predicament pooled their own money to buy groceries for them. Read more
Upsetting news, via Google’s Commerce Blog: Certain retro toys are making a comeback this season. Thanks to the new movie “Ouija,” searches for “Ouija boards” are up 300% since October. What that means, of course, is that evil is on the prowl, waiting to pounce on your home and your innocent children through a magical 20-dollar piece of cardboard. Or so some Christian authorities are warning. Exorcists and paranormal investigators are urging people not to buy the occult board game Ouija as gifts unless they want to invite demonic forces into their homes this Christmas. The warning comes as Google predicted that the modern version of the Victorian-era ‘spirit boards’ will be a sell-out this Christmas. The search engine company has confirmed the game, purportedly used to contact the dead through spelled-out messages, is one of the top trending gifts on its price comparison list this year following the release of the Ouija horror film last month. Here’s the trailer. While critics largely panned the film as cliched and horror-free, a Catholic priest based in Dublin who specialises in the occult, warned that messing around with the real thing can be horrifying. “It’s easy to open up evil spirits but it’s very hard to get rid of them,” the Vincentian priest and exorcist, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told the [Irish] Sunday Independent. Read more
Sharp-eyed Redditor Vakhnenko noticed something striking in recent pictures of the Russian crew aboard the International Space Station (ISS). In previous photos, you could see, on the wall behind the space travelers, black-and-white portraits of famed cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin (the first man in space) and rocket engineer Sergei Korolev (the father of the Soviet space program). Those photos have now been replaced by about half a dozen Christian icons — and two gold crucifixes. Read more
Four years ago, Canadian Yohanan Lowen, then 33, left his Hasidic community behind. That move allowed him to take stock of his religious schooling. Lowen quickly began to see that, due to his education having consisted mostly of studying religious texts, he was woefully under-equipped to deal with life in secular Canada. A 37-year-old former Hasidic Jew is suing the Quebec government for $1.25 million (U.S. $1.1 million) for allowing the ultra-Orthodox schools he attended in the province to teach him nothing of use in the non-Haredi world. “I feel like a child of six years old, alone in the world, who doesn’t have parents, who doesn’t have somebody to take care of him. … I feel even worse than that child because that child only has to take care of himself, but I have to take care of my four children,” Yohanan Lowen told thestar.com. Lowen, who left Quebec’s Hasidic community in 2010 and moved with his family to Montreal, says he is illiterate in French, doesn’t know the alphabet, and understands only the most basic math. He earns a little money teaching Aramaic at a secular night school, and otherwise supports his family on his monthly welfare check. Read more
