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.
When her bat mitzvah approached, Jennifer Traig’s handwashing compulsion began. She’d start scrubbing a half an hour before dinner; when she was done, she’d hold her hands up like a surgeon until her family sat down to eat. Also, … she was so worried about being exposed to pork fumes that she cleaned her shoes and barrettes in a washing machine. According to a CNN story about religion-influenced obsessive-compulsive disorder, Traig, like many OCD sufferers, “… tended to obsess about cleanliness. But because I was reading various Torah portions, I was obsessed with a biblical definition of cleanliness.” Read more
Years after a Galway-area Catholic home for unmarried Irish mothers closed its doors, two boys playing on the grounds made a gruesome discovery: … partially broken concrete slabs covering a hollow — a disused septic tank — “filled to the brim with bones.” So began the latest scandal to swirl around the Catholic Church, an institution whose reputation in Ireland and elsewhere is in tatters due to a gigantic child sex-abuse scandal and the subsequent cover-up. Irish Catholicism was also rocked by revelations about the cruelty and exploitation that were endemic in the Magdalene Laundries, which I previously wrote about here. Read more
On Saturday, Western media shared some very good news: following international protests, Meriam Ibrahim will be set free. The 27-year-old Sudanese woman was sentenced to death two weeks ago, found guilty of leaving Islam for Christianity. Both the charge and the punishment are downright nauseating: Ms Ibrahim was raised a Christian by her mother and has refused to renounce the faith. However, a court ruled earlier this month that she is Muslim because that was her father’s faith. Her Christian marriage was annulled and she was sentenced to 100 lashes for adultery and death by hanging for renouncing Islam. The adultery charge stems from the fact that a Sudanese court decided Ibrahim’s marriage is illegal, because her husband is a Christian. Under Sudan’s version of sharia, a Muslim woman may not marry a non-Muslim man. If she does, that’s considered adultery. Read more
One of the Bible’s most troubling passages is the one in which God asks Abraham to kill Isaac, his son. It went down something like this: It’s best to make fun of the Almighty’s sick challenge to Abraham, a test that, in addition to being immoral, makes no logical sense. After all, God is supposed to be omniscient, in which case he knows full well how Abraham will react. It follows that he doesn’t need to carry out the experiment,… Read more
