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.
Good without God? Join the club. Via Live Science: Researchers asked 1,252 adults of different religious and political backgrounds in the United States and Canada to record the good and bad deeds they committed, witnessed, learned about or were the target of throughout the day. The goal of the study was to assess how morality plays out in everyday life for different people, said Dan Wisneski [pictured below], a professor of psychology at Saint Peter’s University in Jersey City, New Jersey, who helped conduct the study during his tenure at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Read more
Last week, I riffed a little on the disingenuous ways in which U.S. presidents advance the idea that, despite reams of evidence to the contrary, religion is necessarily a force for good. This compulsion is especially great when it comes to Islam, the so-called religion of peace. George W. Bush tried to make us believe that Islam is fundamentally kind, and Barack Obama has repeated the falsehood a hundred times. To hear the current president tell it, literally no religion desires anything but a world full of love and puppy dogs and pretty rainbows. At all cost, apparently, we must pretend that there is no elephant in the room. At the very least we should refrain from mentioning its presence. Last night, in Obama’s ISIL speech on the eve of 9/11 (wasn’t the Twin Towers madness just about the best proof that religion is often anything but benign?), the president again went out of his way to deny the completely obvious link between Islam and violence. Read more
Mark LaGanga is as brave as the first responders he captured on September 11, 2001. LaGanga, a video journalist with CBS, was driving down Manhattan’s West Side Highway when he did his duty: he grabbed his camera and got out to walk straight into a real-life Armageddon. I’d never seen this footage until today. Read more
