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.
Over the past two weeks, a political and media storm has been brewing in England — a tempest over a single-panel religious cartoon that is about as inoffensive as it gets. This one: The anonymous creator of Jesus and Mo typically presents the Muslim prophet and his Christian nemesis/sidekick in four-panel dialogs. Those dialogs are often sharp, the jokes tend toward the blasphemous (as befits an atheist comic strip), and some of the pictures could raise eyebrows as Jesus and Mo appear to be housemates who sleep in very close proximity. It beggars belief that, with all that potentially contentious material for people to get upset over, the almost bland drawing above became a huge flashpoint. But it did, thanks to Muslims’ insistence that Mohammed may not be depicted at all, and thanks to Maajid Nawaz’s innocuous tweet: Read more
A prominent Spanish cardinal doesn’t think my marriage is legit. And I’m not even gay! Fernando Sebastián, the retired archbishop of Pamplona, Spain, who was recently elevated to cardinal status by Pope Francis, has suggested that homosexuality is akin to “bodily deficiencies,” such as his own high blood pressure, and that it can be cured. “Homosexuality is a defective manner of expressing sexuality, because [sex] has a structure and a purpose, which is procreation. A homosexual who can’t achieve this is failing,” Sebastián told the Spanish newspaper Diaro Sur Monday. The Monsignor’s reverence for procreation is nothing new. About four years ago, after I wrote a pro-marriage-equality op-ed for a local paper, I received this response from a reader: Read more
We’re not even in February, but I think this is a potential winner in the category “Bizarre Whodunnit of the Year”: Thieves broke into a small church in the mountains east of Rome over the weekend and stole a reliquary with the blood of the late Pope John Paul II, a custodian said on Monday. Dozens of police with sniffer dogs scoured the remote area for clues to what the Italian Catholic magazine Famiglia Cristiana called “a sacrilegious theft that was probably commissioned by someone”. Franca Corrieri told Reuters she had discovered a broken window early on Sunday morning and had called the police. When they entered the small stone church they found the gold reliquary and a crucifix missing. One of Christianity’s more unsettling practices is the veneration Catholics have for the body parts — and bodily fluids — of their purported saints. Nothing is too ghoulish to turn into a religious object. Jesus’s foreskin. The finger of Doubting Thomas (the one he poked into the gash in Christ’s side). The breast milk of the Virgin Mary. The thumb and head of St. Catherine of Siena. St. Fiacre’s semen-encrusted sock. OK, I made that last one up, but is it really any crazier than the preceding relics? Read more
On Friday, Toronto Sun columnist Anthony Furey mused on religious people’s frequent pleas for “respect,” and couldn’t muster any to give them. That might be surprising. Like rays of sun and children’s laughter, respect is one of those things that no one can be seriously against, right? Hmm. Look, I do like respect. I’ve just never felt obligated to give it to unproven theories and absurd notions. If you feel the same way, don’t feel guilty; for all their stated reverence for “respect,” the faithful don’t truly supply it either. Read more
