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.
Syracuse resident Marcell Washington was a follower of Islam. So when, back in November 2011, he started feeling uneasy about hearing strange whispers — some, perhaps, emanating from his three-year-old son, Ameen — he asked a religious elder what he should do. The man told him to take Ameen (below) to a mosque, where Washington should read the Qur’an and pray. Later that day, this transpired: Marcell Washington put his 3-year-old son into a cold shower and demanded to know if the young boy worshiped only God. When Ameen said “no,” Washington forced open the boy’s eyes so water could fill them. “I did this because I wanted to kill the Shatan that I believed was in my son,” Washington explained later. “I thought by killing a portion of Ameen, it would kill the Shatan in him.” The boy’s frantic struggle convinced his father even more that “Shatan,” or the devil, remained in him. The exorcism continued. Washington held his son’s face under water for about 10 minutes. Read more
Yes, how dare Western moviemakers try to provoke moviegoers’ emotions! The Darren Aronofsky-produced “Noah,” with its depiction of the divinely inspired deluge and the building of an ark that saves surviving species, is the target of a fatwa issued by Al Azhar, a leading Sunni Muslim institution. Read more
You might know the Irish actor Chris O’Dowd from the TV series The IT Crowd and various movies, including This is 40 and Gulliver’s Travels. On his side of the Atlantic, actors who are atheists, like O’Dowd and Daniel Radcliffe, appear to be able to speak their minds with less caution and equivocation than their American counterparts, such as Brad Pitt and George Clooney. Consider these remarks O’Dowd made to GQ in the U.K.: Read more
