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.
If you need a little help winning the lottery, or you just want your favorite sports team to win, try asking the Almighty. It won’t do any good, but you’ll be in good company. From Sarah Pulliam Bailey at Religion News Service: When Americans aren’t busy praying for themselves or their own needs — and most of them are — many are seeking divine intervention on behalf of a favorite sports team or the golden ticket in the lottery, according to a new survey. Read more
Here’s a roundup of two studies about Internet trolling, courtesy of Live Science: “Trolls” — people who intentionally incite discord in online communities — may have a lot in common with real-life sadists, new research suggests. In two studies conducted online, researchers examined personality traits and the online commenting styles of 1,215 people. The investigators found that Internet trolls tended to have personality traits related to sadism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism — a term used by psychologists to describe a person’s tendency to deceive and manipulate others for personal gain. The link between trolling and sadism was the strongest out of all three traits, the researchers said. So what could explain the links between trolling and sadism? Simply put, some people seem to enjoy being argumentative and purposefully disruptive, according to the researchers. “Both trolls and sadists feel sadistic glee at the distress of others,” the researchers, from the University of Manitoba in Canada, wrote in the study. “Sadists just want to have fun … and the Internet is their playground.” Read more
Patheos blogger and Jesus follower Benjamin Corey wasn’t expecting much from the new Nicolas Cage end-times movie Left Behind. And at the Friday premiere, that’s exactly what he got, he says: The movie was impressively horrible — infinitely worse than I had expected. As I said yesterday on That God Show, there’s some really compelling events in the pre-millennial view of eschatology, and you could make some incredibly entertaining movies about it. Unfortunately, this wasn’t one of them. Beyond being a movie with a lousy plot-line, cheesy stereotypes, and crappy special effects, the movie was simply unbiblical. So Corey (who, full disclosure, is a good friend of mine) came up with a tongue-in-cheek list of 10 movies that are more biblical than Left Behind — including Shrek, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Wedding Crashers, and Austin Powers. Read more
Der Spiegel has an interesting and scary interview with Peter Piot, a medical researcher who was on the team that investigated the world’s first known Ebola outbreak, in 1976, and gave the illness its name. Piot recalls how Ebola made its first wave of victims. Missionary Catholic nuns spread the disease through a stunning disregard for medical protocol: “In their hospital they regularly gave pregnant women vitamin injections using unsterilized needles. By doing so, they infected many young women in Yambuku [in the Congo] with the virus… I can still see the Ebola patients in Yambuku, how they died in their shacks and we couldn’t do anything except let them die.” Read more
