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.
Not being a connoisseur of comics, I’d always assumed that most comic book characters were religiously neutral. After all, religion can be divisive — so if you’re a creator of comic books, why alienate a big chunk of your prospective audience with your character’s God beliefs? But that was before I stumbled across Comic Book Religion, a website that claims to have sussed out the theological leanings of everyone from Batman (lapsed Episcopalian/Catholic) to Bart Simpson (Western Branch of American Reform Presbylutheranism). Read more
Hazelmary Bull was saddened and distressed when Britain’s highest court told her and her husband Peter on Wednesday that they had no right to refuse a double room to a gay couple. Peter and Hazelmary Bull had asked the Supreme Court to decide whether their decision not to let Martyn Hall and his civil partner Steven Preddy stay in a double room constituted sex discrimination under equality legislation. … They argued their decision was founded on a “religiously-informed judgment of conscience” and that earlier judgements against them were a breach of their human rights to freedom of religion. Read more
“Hi honey, how was school?” “Hi Mom. Okay, I guess. Ms. Crowley killed a girl with an axe, right before our eyes. Then she and Mr. Morrison, the janitor, took us on a plane to New York where three hundred men wearing clown masks did naughty things to our private areas before putting us on a flight back just in time to get on the school bus. Ms. Crowley gave us a baby’s blood to drink on the way home. Hey, I’m hungry, can I have a peanut-butter sandwich?” That’s the (admittedly) cartoon-y version of how the 1980s and 1990s conversations about so-called ritual satanic abuse went down in hundreds of American households. How could an adult with half a brain possibly believe such outlandish, impossible tales? But parents of young children that were led into telling fabrications did believe them. Then police, detectives, and prosecutors did. And ultimately, jurors did, too. Over about a dozen years, the wavelet of prosecutions for Satanic ritual abuse was as close as we got to a modern-day, national witch hunt. I still remember, by name, some of the actual victims, adults accused of unspeakable things they didn’t do, couldn’t possibly have done — not literally, not really, not within the known constraints of time and space and physics. Kelly Michaels. Paul Ingram. Virginia McMartin. Betsy and Bob Kelly. These people went to trial — and to jail — despite the badly botched police investigations, and despite the obvious hackwork performed by pediatric therapists who somehow kept seeing proof of child sex abuse where none existed. Against all common sense, juries put innocent men and women behind bars on the vilest of charges. Over time, as the moral panic subsided and new questions were raised, more and more of these prisoners were released and usually exonerated. Now, it looks like two more will finally walk free — after twenty-one years behind bars. Meet Fran and Dan Keller, who, in 1992, stood accused of doing this (the following is not for the faint of heart): Read more
“An outrage,” pastor John Culp calls it. “It doesn’t offer any protection!” moral-panics his colleague Dick Lincoln. Why are religious officials in Richland County, South Carolina fuming? They’re up in arms over the county’s proposal to do away with restrictions stipulating that bars have to be at least 600 feet from the nearest church. The change would allow bars to open next door to congregations in some unincorporated areas if a majority of the 11 council members end the minimum 600-foot setback — slightly more than a tenth of a mile. It is aimed at “storefront churches” that are popping up increasingly in traditional business locations like strip malls and near warehouses, said Councilman Norman Jackson of Lower Richland, who proposed the change. That is creating unintended limits on where bars can locate, Jackson said. Read more
