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 you’ve already got the free church gun and the free church steak dinner, why not go for the trifecta and get a tattoo to match? Head to Florida and get the logo of the Cross church in Mount Dora inked on your skin. No charge! Pastor Zach Zehnder loves the churchgoers who’ve done just that. “It speaks to their dedication of not just the church, but them following after Jesus,” Zehnder said. … “We touched on the idea of tattoos and I kind of flippantly… said I’m so not against tattoos that if anybody out there wants to get one, the church would find money for it.” Read more
Science junkies meet couch potatoes for a TV spectacle both should enjoy. Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey is a new, 13-episode documentary series hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson that kicks off tonight at 9:00p (ET) on Fox, National Geographic, and eight other cable networks. It will also be be shown in more than 175 countries across the globe, says the L.A. Times. The paper has an interview with executive producer Seth MacFarlane, who implies that he helped fund the project. I was crossing paths with [Tyson] … and I always thought to myself, I have a connection there to the scientific community and things are going well financially and I wanted to see what I could do to throw some of this extra money around in a positive way. Science is, in many ways, more and more underfunded. I was thinking in terms of research projects, I asked him if there were any research projects that need funding in any field of science. Tyson mentioned it would be wonderful to do a remake of Carl Sagan’s famous TV series from the 1980s, Fox TV signed on after MacFarlane brought the idea to them, and here we are. Read more
Over time, U.S. Christians have gotten a reputation for being terrible tippers. I’d wager that some of that has to do with the identifiability of the group. The worst of the Christian tipping behavior is perceived to take place on Sundays, when Christians are extra-visible as a group on account of their church clothes and/or their time of arrival (shortly after church services end). When these groups leave paltry tips, selective perception on the part of the staff may lead waiters to assign a pattern of behavior to them that could apply just as well to not-overtly-Christian groups, except that the latter don’t share any obvious characteristics. Read more
A pastor in Troy, New York perhaps took a cue from the Kentucky Baptist Convention when he decided that a great way to promote the Lord Jesus was to give away an AR-15 rifle. The flyer that the Rev. John Koletas has been distributing shows a picture of the fierce-looking firearm below a Biblical quote, from John 14:27, that reads “My peace I give unto you.” Read more
