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.
Since we last wrote about Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski (below), almost a year ago, he’s been through some changes. You may recall that Wesolowski, the papal nuncio (ambassador) to the Dominican Republic, was recalled to Rome after allegations surfaced that he’d been sexually abusing Dominican boys for years. True to its word, the Catholic Church began an investigation into the archbishop’s sordid past. Two months ago, that probe reached its conclusion: Read more
Forced conversions to Islam are as old as the religion itself. I’ve never understood why it works. Wouldn’t you quietly seethe with anger or stew in resentment over having been made to give up the sacred beliefs that you and your forefathers swore by? I’m not puzzled by what brings about acute forced conversions. The threat of imprisonment, beatings, torture, rape, outcast status, and/or burdensome religious taxes ought to do it. But I don’t follow why the imposed religion ultimately takes hold, often within a generation. Virtually none of the African people who were captured and brought to North America as slaves were originally Christians. But they soon internalized forced Christianity to such an extent that, in the United States, they became regarded as exemplars of piety. Later, in our time, it emerged that African-Americans are markedly more religious [that is, Christian] on a variety of measures than the U.S. population as a whole, including level of affiliation with a religion, attendance at religious services, frequency of prayer, and religion’s importance in life. It would be wonderful if forced conversions were futile because people’s deeply-held religious beliefs (or the absence of any god belief at all) are impervious to brutal coercion. But chances are good that the Yazidis in this ISIS video, who are filmed as they are forced to swear loyalty to Islam (skip to 5:56), will be faithful Muslims in a dozen years or fewer. Their children almost certainly will be, if ISIS isn’t beaten back. Read more
Via the Telegraph, proof that women in Islam are perhaps equal to men after all: A female jihadist from London has vowed to become the first female to behead a western prisoner in Syria. Khadijah Dare, who is originally from Lewisham in south east London, took to Twitter to celebrate the brutal murder of American journalist James Foley. Read more
When two preteen sisters were abducted from the town of Oswegatchie in upstate New York recently, police quickly sprang into action. Naturally, officers asked the parents for photos of their daughters, so that the girls’ likenesses could be distributed in a bid to bring the young victims back. The reply was unusual: The family had none: They were Amish, a community that generally prohibits photographs partly based on the biblical injunction against likenesses. The cops then proposed that the parents work with a police sketch artist to produce pictures of the girls. Read more
