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.
Last Thursday, a student at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga found himself forced to the ground by four security officers for attempting to verbally engage a fire-and-brimstone campus preacher who is an outsider — not a student or a faculty member. Angela Cummings, who’s been preaching for a dozen years, had been showing up at the campus for weeks, loudly calling the students “adulterers and adulteresses” (an odd charge to level at people who are, for the most part, unmarried). “Are you a child of God or a child of the devil?” she demanded to know. Student Cole Philip Montalvo, who was riding a bicycle, was violently taken down and pepper-sprayed when he breached, by about a bike-length, a wide orange-coned circle on campus. The altercation happened after he addressed Cummings by advising her: Hey ma’am? If you’re trying to spread the good word, maybe you shouldn’t be telling everyone that they’re sinners, and maybe you shouldn’t be yelling at everyone. Here’s the video of the preacher’s (and the guards’) handiwork. The incident starts at 7:18. Read more
Headline in the Watauga Democrat (North Carolina), November 6: Schools Decline ‘In God We Trust’ Posters Headline in the same newspaper, eight days later: Schools Accept ‘In God We Trust’ Posters As regular readers of this site may remember, the posters in question are framed photos of an American flag with the motto “In God We Trust” superimposed on it. They are being offered by American Legion Post 130. The placards are now welcome in the public schools after all. Why the yo-yo-ing? Read more
If Christians are killed by other Christians, do the dead still count as martyrs for Jesus? With that question in mind, Ruth Alexander of BBC News takes issue with the much-bandied-about number that annually, around the world, 100,000 Christians are killed because of their faith. Alexander looked into that squishy statistic and found that … it comes originally from the Center for the Study of Global Christianity (CSGC) at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in the US state of Massachusetts, which publishes such a figure each year in its Status of Global Mission (see line 28). Its researchers started by estimating the number of Christians who died as martyrs between 2000 and 2010 — about one million by their reckoning — and divided that number by 10 to get an annual number, 100,000. But where does that number of one million come from? Read more
There’s nothing quite like a big display of ostentatious, costly excess to celebrate a holy man’s asceticism and humility. Via the Huffington Post: The Mahabodhi Temple at Bodh Gaya in Bihar, India, marks the spot where Buddha renounced material wealth along with emotions like anger and envy, according to author Thubten Samphel. Despite its spiritual significance, the King of Thailand, along with some others, has donated 660 pounds of gold to create a shiny new temple dome that will be inlaid with the precious metal. Read more
This year, the phenomenon of restaurant customers writing aggressive, even hateful “Christian” messages on credit card receipts in lieu of a tip seems to have reached, well, a tipping point. We’ve also seen that it’s common in some circles to leave, rather than a gratuity, a fake ten-dollar bill with a Bible verse printed on the back. And a few years ago, we got reports that some Christians who go out to dine on Sunday tell the wait staff they won’t tip … because they don’t approve of people working on the Christian Sabbath. How did it get like this? Maybe there’s some copy-catting going on here; bad behavior can be contagious. Perhaps it was always this widespread, and the spread of camera phones and social media just makes this kind of douchebaggery more visible. Before I dive a little deeper, I guess it’s time to toss in my own story about Christian tipping here. Read more
