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.
Did two Australian Mormons decide they’d had enough of their religion’s squeaky-clean image? What we know is that the duo, Amanaki Kaufusi, 21 (see image below), and Onesi Taufui, 18, had signed up to attend a Latter-Day Saints conference in Tallebudgera (Queensland) over the weekend. Not content with the program, they soon began looking for a little divertissement, and found it in the person of an unsuspecting passerby, 24-year-old tourist Onyekachi Okoye. Read more
Residents of Safed, a city of 35,000 in Israel’s Upper Galilee, are unhappy with the presence of Israeli Arabs in their midst. So unhappy, in fact, that they’ve started a campaign, led by Shmuel Eliyahu, the town’s head rabbi, to make it a crime to rent rooms to their Arab fellow countrymen. That makes Eli Tzavieli a potential lawbreaker. Read more
Two years ago, Riaz Ahmed, now 34, and Ijaz Ahmed, 38, claimed to have seen God. Due to the vagaries of religion, such a claim may mark someone as supremely devout, or possibly a little loopy. But in Pakistan, where even something as innocuous as quoting the Qur’an can get you in trouble with the law, seeing God marks you for death under the country’s blasphemy law. Judge Chaudhry Zafar Iqbal on Saturday awarded death sentences to two men he found… Read more
