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 it talks like a duck and walks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. No such conclusion applies to the ostensibly Buddhist monks of New York City, who are, in most cases, just aggressive beggars with shaved heads and flowing robes — and who don’t know the first thing about Buddhism, suggests the New York Times: Read more
In a pretty gutsy move, Atlanta Black Star, a web publication for African-Americans, has done its predominantly Christian audience a great and effective service. An article by ABS staff presents basic financial information about eight black pastors who earn more than 200 times what their average congregant makes. Read more
We are hard-wired to recognize faces in a sea of visual noise. It’s a smart survival tactic for a baby, but adults can be anywhere from amused to embarrassed by their own tendency to detect faces in random data. The ones who are neither amused nor embarrassed — because they think that there’s divine meaning in the faces they see — are the hardcore people of faith who believe that God is sometimes moved to burn a picture of the Virgin Mary in a piece of toast, or that the Almighty, from time to time, sees fit to depict Jesus on a drop cloth, in bird shit, and so on. The overall phenomenon is known as pareidolia or apophenia, and I just learned there’s a very entertaining Facebook page devoted to it, called Faces in Stuff. This one made me laugh out loud: Read more
