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.
Irish drag artist Miss Panti Bliss (a.k.a. Rory O’Neill) went on national TV late last month, and called people who actively campaign against gay rights “homophobes.” That would be unremarkable in most of the developed world, and a legally protected opinion to boot. But in Ireland, not so much. [O’Neill] was threatened with legal action for defamation by the writer John Waters …, by the [conservative Catholic] Iona Institute, who made the video [that O’Neill had criticized], and by Breda O’Brien, an Irish Times columnist. And then, RTÉ, Ireland’s national broadcaster, went through the looking glass. In a matter of weeks, it paid Waters €40,000 ($54,000) in damages. O’Brien and the Iona Institute received €45,000 ($61,000) between them. RTÉ also decided to issue an apology for O’Neill’s comments. Read more
Remember the posters of the Flying Spaghetti Monster going missing from a freshers’ fair at London’s South Bank University? It was all a misunderstanding caused by an undertrained, overzealous staff member, says the student union responsible from the removal. This afternoon, the union released a letter of apology. Read more
The spread of rational thinking appears unstoppable, evidenced by how secularization in the United States and Western Europe is continuing at encouraging speeds. But by some other metrics, things aren’t really going our way. According to data from the National Science Foundation’s just-released 2014 Science and Engineering Indicators study … the percentage of Americans who think astrology is “not at all scientific” declined from 62 percent in 2010 to just 55 percent in 2012 (the last year for which data is available). As a result, NSF reports that Americans are apparently less skeptical of astrology than they have been at any time since 1983. Read more
This is the kind of place where Durga Buda spends four miserable nights every month. In her case, it’s a backyard shed that the locals call a goth, erected from bamboo and straw, with walls made of mud and dung. It’s four feet wide, four feet tall, and dangerous. Buda is afraid of wild animals, including snakes, and also leery of drunk villagers who may disrespect or even attack her. Were it up to Buda, she’d sleep in the main house, the one that’s made of bricks, where her family of eight resides, including her in-laws. But she’s not allowed to when she has her period. During that time, she’s dirty, and everything she touches becomes dirty too. Read more
A Hindu activist group in India that had brought a lawsuit against the publisher of an American scholar’s book is getting its way in a hair-raising settlement. Penguin India, which had published Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History, has pledged in writing to stop selling the book and pulp all remaining copies. The political and religious group that forced the book’s removal and destruction charged that The Hindus was offensive and inaccurate and full of “sexual connotations.” Neither Penguin nor Doniger have admitted to any gross mistakes or mischaracterizations. Doniger is incensed about her Indian publisher’s capitulation, and issued a riot-act statement: Read more
