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.
Yesterday morning, this is what Sam Harris woke up to: Some person who goes by the name of @dan_verg_ on Twitter took the most easily misunderstood sentence in The End of Faith out of (its absolutely essential) context, attached it to a scary picture of me, and declared me a “genocidal fascist maniac.” Then Reza Aslan retweeted it. An hour later, Glenn Greenwald retweeted it again. Here, in its original form, is the (slightly altered) quote that was so eagerly disseminated: “Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.” Sounds serious. Read more
Christ is a great pal, now and forever. Wouldn’t you like to meet him? Police say that was the basic motivation behind the crime committed the other day by Pamela Christensen, an Illinois mother with end-times delusions who confessed that she had attempted to murder her three daughters. After 911 dispatchers received two hang-up calls from the Montgomery home, officers went there and found the girls upstairs. Two of them had been stabbed in the chest by their God-besotted mom. Read more
Back in May, five members of a strange Chinese cult called Eastern Lightning — a.k.a. the Church of the Almighty God — walked into a McDonald’s restaurant in Zhaoyuan and harassed one of the customers, trying to recruit her into the cult. When the woman, Wu Shuoyan, declined to hand over her phone number, the five decided that she deserved to die “because she’s a monster, she’s an evil spirit,” explained Zhang Lidong (55), an unemployed pharmaceutical salesman who led the attack. Read more
Salon interviewed Reza Aslan (below) about the contentious exchange on Islam that Ben Affleck and Sam Harris had on Bill Maher’s HBO show recently. Whatever else you may think of Aslan’s positions, here’s one that deserves a little pushback, if not an outright fisking: “Sam Harris, to me, gives atheism a bad name because he comes from a tradition of atheism that is really disconnected from the titans of intellectual, philosophical atheism who gave birth to the modern world. These were experts in religion who, from a position of expertise, criticized religion. Sam Harris is a neuroscientist; he knows as much about religion as I do about neuroscience. The difference is that I don’t go around writing books about neuroscience.” This is rich for various reasons. Read more
