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.
It’s not unusual for a sermon to draw boredom and stifled yawns. But pastor Juan Demetrius McFarland of Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama found a very special way to make congregants hang on his every word these past few Sundays. Last month, he began admitting, right from the pulpit, that he’d done some bad things. And bit by bit, over several weeks, it all came out: how he’d been using drugs, and how he’d “mishandled” church money. But those revelations were nothing compared to this bombshell confession: McFarland not only said that he’d been having sex with women in his flock — in the church building, no less — but also that he’d wittingly exposed his sexual partners to the HIV virus. For the last six years, he said, he’d known that he has full-blown AIDS. Read more
How do religious shysters build entire financial empires? Why do they get away with running obvious Ponzi schemes for years on end, while no one appears to ask them any hard questions? Cathy Lerman, a Florida lawyer who is representing several victims of religious fraudster Ephren Taylor (sometimes dubbed “the black Bernie Madoff”), offers at least part of the answer: “Religious-affinity fraud is quite common, but it’s not discussed inside the church, and that’s one of the problems. No one wants to admit that it occurs, and that’s how [Taylor] did this for so long. A lot of these people were ashamed, or they felt from a religious standpoint that what happens in the church stays in the church, and you don’t go telling anybody and you don’t have him arrested and you don’t do anything.” “Who would dream that someone would come into your church and use your faith as a weapon to steal?” said Lerman. “All of them believed that they were the only ones; they thought they had been stupid.” From 2007 to 2010, Taylor gave “Wealth Tour Live” seminars in churches around the country. Read more
There is a deep anti-intellectual streak that runs through much of religious America, and it’s entirely justified. No, I’m not saying that we ought to give the thumbs-up to poor thinking skills and the inability to distinguish facts from fiction. I’m saying, rather, that fundamentalists are right about academic learning: the more of it you do, the less likely you are to attend church or to talk to God. New research by economists at Louisiana State University offers some tantalizing evidence: The study finds that more education, in the form of more years of formal schooling, has “consistently large negative effects” on an individual’s likelihood of attending religious services, as well as their likelihood of praying frequently. More schooling also makes people less likely to harbor superstitious beliefs, like belief in the protective power of lucky charms (rabbit’s feet, four leaf clovers), or a tendency to take horoscopes seriously. Read more
I consider the Washington Post’s Gene Weingarten to be one of the best journalists in the country. He jumped onto my radar screen five years ago, with a truly gut-wrenching feature article about distracted parents who leave their young child in the car without realizing it, with tragic consequences. Another story of his, a lovely tribute to aging dogs and how they process their memories, is equally unforgettable. Others value his talents at least as much as I do — Weingarten is the recipient of two Pulitzer Prizes. Today I learned that he is also an atheist (although that particular “secret” was out years ago; I just missed it). More importantly, he isn’t going to take the incessant Christian drumbeat in the U.S.A. lying down anymore. After Weingarten noticed the ocean of religious books for children, and the paucity of atheism-themed kids’ books, Weingarten penned Me and Dog, a riff on power and religion. Here’s the Amazon description: Read more
