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.
An Israeli rabbinical court has told a mother who is divorcing her husband that she must have her young son ritually circumcised. She’s being fined $140 a day until she complies. The rabbinical judges in the case said in their decision the woman was opposing the circumcision as a means to bringing her husband back to her. They also referred explicitly to the growing debate around ritual male circumcision elsewhere in the world, and voiced their fear of the precedent that could be created by a Jewish Israeli woman allowed not to circumcise her son. “We have witnessed for some time now public and legal struggles against the brit milah in many countries in Europe and in the United States,” the judges wrote. “The public in Israel has stood as one man against these trends, seeing them as yet another aspect of displays of anti-Semitism that must be combatted.” Read more
A Humanist group in North Carolina has offered a matching donation to the public schools in Watauga County: posters that remind the pupils of the historical Treaty of Tripoli, which states, courtesy of founding founder John Adams, The United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion. The “matching” aspect is in the fact that the same schools recently accepted posters proclaiming “In God We Trust,” provided by a chapter of the American Legion. Late last week, in a brief phone call, Marshall Ashcraft, the district’s Director of Public Information, told Cash Wilson, VP of the Western North Carolina Humanists, that the district will accept their Tripoli-poster offer. Read more
The bottom just fell out of a viral story that also made it onto Friendly Atheist a week and a half ago. Waitress Dayna Morales’ account of being stiffed on her tip by a customer who wrote on the credit card receipt that she did not agree with Morales’ “lifestyle” has been thrown into doubt. That’s because the still-unidentified woman and her husband contacted a local TV station and produced their own copy of the credit card receipt — with the same time stamp — that showed they left Morales an $18 tip on a $94 bill. More importantly, They also produced a credit card statement showing they had been billed for the full amount of the bill plus the tip. Read more
Leslie Salzillo, who blogs for Liberals Unite, was incredulous when she found this on a Facebook page for the Christian American Patriots Militia (already shared more than 500 times): I don’t have full access to the CAPM (closed) Facebook page yet, but the public part alone is similarly unsettling. This is from the group’s “about” text: Read more
Curiosity is a wonderful monograph by British science writer Philip Ball. He chronicles how, many centuries ago, under the influence of religion, curiosity became a shameful characteristic, a twin to arrogance (mostly because being curious signaled you weren’t content to merely gawp in gratitude at God’s creation). Eventually, to humankind’s credit, curiosity morphed into a trait celebrated for its role in scientific progress. At my request, Ball’s U.S. publisher, the University of Chicago Press, sent me three hardcover copies to give away to readers of this blog.** To make it interesting, I asked you to share your favorite autobiographical story involving curiosity, and you did! Here are, in my highly subjective opinion, the three best submissions, in no particular order. Read more
