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.
Eternal bliss that isn’t, via the Onion: Saying they were reluctant to make the change but that budget pressures left them no other choice, divine sources announced Tuesday that the traditional promise of salvation would be reduced from eternity to 500 billion years. “To help us meet the rising cost of maintaining Heaven as a lavish kingdom of perfection for all penitent souls, we will now be limiting believers to afterlives consisting of half a trillion years, an amount of… Read more
In some people’s interpretation of religious morality, kids have to get fucked one way or the other. Four men, including a rabbi, were indicted on Tuesday on charges they stole millions of dollars from a taxpayer-funded preschool for disabled kids. Rabbi Samuel Hiller, Ira Kurman, Roy Hoffman and Daniel Laniado from the Island Child Development Center (ICDC) were busted for allegedly siphoning off $12.4 million of the institution’s $27 million state-funded budget between 2005 and 2012, using the money for themselves and for other business interests. Read more
Think about “the end of Europe.” Do you suppose it is more likely that such a thing will be brought on by military aggression à la Russia’s de facto annexation of Ukraine, or by the TV appearance of a bearded singer performing in drag? I ask because Victory for Austria’s bearded transvestite Conchita Wurst at the Eurovision Song Contest prompted an outpouring of anti-gay anger from Russian politicians and stars on Sunday. … “There’s no limit to our outrage. It’s the end of Europe. It has turned wild. They don’t have men and women any more. They have ‘it’,” nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky told Rossiya-1 state television. Read more
Last month, Brunei became the first Southeast Asian country to embrace Sharia law, courtesy of Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, the country’s oil-rich Dear Leader. That means that Brunei’s 415,000 citizens can now be fined, jailed, flogged, or disfigured for any of the following crimes (and then some): Read more
