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.
Mohammad Masroor is the kind of conservative Muslim leader who normally wants to see women dress in burqas and niqabs. Except when he rapes them, and when they subsequently testify against him in court. Masroor says that his recent conviction on 15 counts of sexual assault against three young girls (his youngest victim was 10) is unfair because he didn’t get to face some of his accusers in court; they wore face-obscuring Islamic garments. Read more
Mindboggling bloodlust from a man of God: A rabbi at the prestigious haredi Mir Yeshiva in Jerusalem told students recently that the government is comparable to the Jewish people’s ancient enemy the Amalekites and that government officials should in theory be killed. In March, Rabbi Nissan Kaplan was discussing the special Bible reading relating to the Amalekites and noted that Rabbi Aharon Leib Shteinman, the leader of the non-hassidic haredi (ultra-Orthodox) world, had said that the current government should be considered to be Amalekites. “On Shabbat I spoke to my kids, and I said that Rabbi Shteinman spoke and said ‘practically speaking we have today Haman, Amalek, all of this government, and the way is to take knives and to kill them, like with the [ancient] Greeks,’” Kaplan said. … Read more
Sometimes it’s a honest expression of puzzlement. Often, it’s a deliberate provocation, a cheap way to try to rile a non-believer. I’m talking about a line I’ve heard from believers (and some apatheists) at least a dozen times: “For an atheist, you sure care a lot about religion.” Sometimes that’s followed by the grizzled canard that atheism is itself a religion (to which the best answer probably is “Yeah, just like ‘off’ is a TV channel”); or there’s some premature Schadenfreude and nose-thumbing about how atheists are unable to ban religion from their lives because we are defined by our opposition to it. Over at Camels With Hammers, philosopher/blogger Daniel Fincke carefully unpacks that criticism and shows it to be lazy and illogical. His essay runs to almost 3,800 words, but I’ll give you the Cliff Notes version in seven quotes that stood out for me. Read more
On Tuesday night, Republican Ben Sasse of Nebraska won his party’s nomination to the Senate, in part on the strength of his (you’ll never guess…) religious convictions. It doesn’t take more than ten seconds to assess what kind of candidate Sasse is. His website says, about religious freedom, We live in a country where the Little Sisters of the Poor, an order of Catholic nuns, must sue the government in order to continue caring for the sick and elderly poor. That’s outrageous. Read more
