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.
“Yazidi Girls Seized by ISIS Speak Out After Escape,” via the New York Times: The 15-year-old girl, crying and terrified, refused to release her grip on her sister’s hand. Days earlier, Islamic State fighters had torn the girls from their family, and now were trying to split them up and distribute them as spoils of war. The jihadist who had selected the 15-year-old as his prize pressed a pistol to her head, promising to pull the trigger. But it was only when the man put a knife to her 19-year-old sister’s neck that she finally relented, taking her next step in a dark odyssey of abduction and abuse at the hands of the Islamic State. There are between five and seven thousand of these Yazidi female slaves who are forced to be at Islamist fighters’ beck and call. (As we learn of their fate, let’s try not to imagine too vividly what happened to the Yazidi boys and men.) [The girls were] were taken to a three-story building crowded with hundreds of captives. The building functioned as a kind of clearinghouse. Islamic State fighters would stop by and take their pick of the girls and young women. Some, perhaps in a reflection of their lower rank, would take only one girl, while others took more, D. A. and other escapees said. The men in this recent video, who are purported to be ISIS fighters, talk excitedly about visiting just such a slave facility. Read more
In the mid-1970s, the faith-healing cult of a charismatic preacher by the name of Hobart Freeman came to the attention of health authorities in Indiana. One health official observed that at Faith Assembly’s quarters, Diabetics were not taking their insulin and pregnant women were receiving no prenatal or postnatal care… They are laying dead babies and live babies next to each other on the altars and praying over them to get the live babies to bring life back to the dead ones. There was one woman… praying over a baby for four days before the funeral home got hold of it. The group was socially impenetrable except for those who fully embraced its claims of … prophesy, miraculous healings, testimonies, speaking in tongues, and believers being slain in the Spirit… A sense of community care, cohesion, exclusiveness, superiority and persecution grew with the breadth, authority, and enthusiasm of [Freeman’s] teaching. Those with divergent doctrines, beliefs or practices either conformed or were excluded. Outside interactions grew less and were sometimes severed over these issues. And that’s what survivor Josh Wilson recalls too, in this brand new video.. Read more
Which book is most valuable to humanity? Predictably but depressingly, even in the rapidly secularizing British Isles, the most common answer is the Bible. The Bible has been voted more valuable to humanity than Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by the British public. The Folio Society survey conducted by YouGov asked members of the public to name the books of most significance for the modern world. A total of 2,044 adult respondents were asked to pick the three most important books from a list of 30. The resulting Top 10 looks like this: Read more
William Kamm, a.k.a. the Little Pebble, a name given to him by the Virgin Mary, will be back on the street within a week. The German-born Australian cult leader just got paroled after spending nine years in prison for multiple sexual assaults on two underage girls, crimes that flowed from his belief that he’s been chosen by God to become the next Pope, but without the required celibacy. Kamm is the head of the Order of St. Charbel, a cult group that claims to fall under the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. The Vatican begs to differ. Kamm claims the Latin Rite rules of obligatory celibacy do not apply to him, not even if finally declared “pope” sometime in the future; nor does it apply to the priests of his order. Read more
