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.
Rushing to the aid of embattled U.K. councilman David Silvester, who recently claimed that being gay was “a ‘spiritual disease’ and that the country had been ‘beset by storms’ since the passing of the gay marriage bill,” British columnist Dean Burnett, tongue planted firmly in cheek, decisively explains the shocking meteorology behind gay couples getting hitched. Logically, same-sex marriage leads to an increase in the number of weddings. Weddings invariably involve a large number of people congregating in one place, which leads to a lot of body heat and warming, and this heat enters the atmosphere, increasing the air temperature and producing more warm fronts. People also cry a lot at weddings. This is likely to be even more pronounced at same-sex weddings, with the added element of recently achieved equality making the events even more poignant. Tears are basically water, which quickly evaporate, thus adding to the water content of the atmosphere. Read more
It’s impossible, in this space, to do justice to the breadth and depth of religious insanity that writer Jeff Tietz chronicles in this riveting 9,300-word Rolling Stone story. But in a nutshell, the piece is about the suicide — perhaps the murder — of a 27-year-old writer and nurse named Bethany Deaton, who had been married just a couple of months when her body was found in October of 2012. She had been suffocated by a white plastic bag tied under her chin. Tietz’s article, from which I’ll quote below to give you a flavor, explores the disturbing social dynamic in a group (make that a cult) of about 20-25 young people, mostly college students, associated with the International House of Prayer (IHOP) in Kansas City, Missouri. The group’s leader was Tyler Deaton (pictured below) — “tall, handsome, haughty and effeminate” — who’d married Bethany despite the strong same-sex attractions he’d felt all his life. Read more
A mother in Germantown, Maryland stabbed her four kids with knives, killing two, because she thought they were possessed by a demonic entity. The two dead children — a boy, Norell Harris, 1, and a girl, Zyana Harris, 2 — were found Friday morning on their mother’s bed in a Germantown townhouse. Both had been stabbed repeatedly, police said. A sister, Taniya Harris, 5, and a brother, Martello Harris, 8, were seriously injured but are expected to survive. Zakieya Latrice Avery, 28, is thought to have carried out the attack with a housemate, Monifa Denise Sanford, 21. Both suspects said under questioning that they had been trying to dislodge the devil, CBS News reported. Read more
