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 reader politely asked me this morning why, in yesterday’s fisking of Michael Brown’s dishonest post over at Charisma News, I hadn’t addressed Brown’s strenuous defense of homophobic evangelists Scott Lively and Lou Engle. The answer is that the passage in question wasn’t there before (and I read the shoddy piece several times when it came out). To cover his backside (?), I presume Brown or his editors added it after reading my critique — without noting anywhere that theirs was a post-publication, um, refinement. By any reasonable journalistic code, it’s a no-no to make major alterations to a published article without then indicating that you’ve done so. (Fixing a typo or a minor flub is one thing; adding a critical paragraph with completely new content requires disclosure.) Read more
A marital spat over religion cost one Malaysian Hindu woman her baby. Her husband insisted his spouse become a Muslim; when she refused, he grabbed their 11-month-old daughter and disappeared. That was more than five years ago. Though a civil court granted the mother custody, she never saw her child again, because her legal victory was canceled out by the father gaining custody in a Islamic (Sharia) court. As reported by the Associated Press, Police have been unwilling to enforce the civil court’s decision. Read more
Remember how proudly secular Turkey was since the days of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk? Unusually for a country where 98 out of a 100 citizens still self-identify as Muslims, Turkey became a secular, democratic republic close to a century ago. In the last two decades, driven in part by its remarkably thin-skinned, immoderate Islamic leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who rarely misses a chance to push his religious agenda, that ideal has been hollowed out. And so we get this: The Turkish Armed Forces has updated its set of regulations for the high school academies that it administers, inserting an article in the chapter for “protection of students.” It advises a ban on screening films or shows that depict “sexual exploitation, pornography, exhibitionism, abuse, harassment and all negative behaviors.” [The national newspaper] Hurriyet cites Game of Thrones as one of the main culprits. Read more
Christian persecution, I tells ya. A Del Mar [California] man convicted of raping two women he met on the online dating sites ChristianMingle.com and Match.com was sentenced Friday to 37 years to life in prison. In his final statement before he was punished, Navy Lieutenant Sean Banks quoted what he said was his favorite Bible verse. “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good,” Banks said. If your Bible knowledge needs some refreshing, that’s Genesis 50:20. Read more
More than 20 years ago, Nat Hentoff penned a book that was an eye-opener for me. It’s called Free Speech For Me But Not For Thee — How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other. My sympathies at the time were with progressive politics, in part because I had often read about instances of rightwing authorities — from actual dictators to school boards stacked with conservative Christians — trying to muzzle expressions on the left. Although I associated Hentoff with lefty bastions like The Village Voice, the weekly where he worked for half a century, in his book he was committed to documenting free-speech attacks from both sides of the political divide. That was courageous, I thought. Hentoff led me to become better at spotting — and fighting — efforts to muzzle dissent in all kinds of places, no matter the speaker’s ideology or political preference. One of the goals of this blog is to give atheists a strong voice, and so we find ourselves in opposition to religious privilege on an almost daily basis. However, Hemant and I have also frequently defended religious people, coming out in favor of letting them say their piece when they have the constitutional right to do so, and condemning efforts to shut them up or shout them down. Some examples are here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. This is all by way of saying that it’s an odd sensation to be accused of wishing to forcibly shove people into the closet for the crime of expressing their views. Yet that’s precisely the allegation that Michael Brown makes. Brown is a columnist for Charisma News. I wrote about him last week, calling out his oversized Christian persecution complex. He didn’t like the piece, as I figured he wouldn’t, and as is certainly his right. But in rebutting it, he badly misrepresents what I wrote, starting with a mendacious headline: An Atheist Tells Me to Keep My Faith in the Closet. Interesting, because this is what I wrote last week: Read more
