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.
I was talking about science and religion with a Dutch friend yesterday when he casually referred to the Van Schayk affair and asked me what I thought of it. My mind drew a blank, so he filled me in. It’s a bizarre and fascinating story that I thought I’d share. In March of this year, a Dutchman named Onno van Schayk, a professor of medicine and the head of the CAPHRI School for Public Health in Maastricht, the Netherlands, caused a bit of an uproar when he gave an interview to an evangelical TV station. He mentioned his Christian beliefs a few times, and then segued into this remarkable statement: “There have been moments that I’ve seen God’s work directly, up close. It involved a person whose leg was too short, who was being prayed for. And I saw that leg grow. … I concede we have to be careful with that, and that the [stories] in the Bible — they should be tested, examined. We shouldn’t just assume things. We have to apply, very carefully, almost a scientific principle — establish that it’s incontrovertible. And in this case, it was indeed incontrovertible. You could see from looking at the X-rays that [bone] growth had indisputably occurred, something for which there was no normal explanation.” Read more
Despite the fact that millions of people consider the Catholic Church to be its own crime syndicate, Pope Francis is now under a threat from actual gangsters — the kind with guns. So claims Italian prosecutor Nicola Gratteri via the Washington Post. The mafia crime cartel that may have its sights trained on the pointiff is known as the ‘Ndrangheta. Read more
Urban violence in Detroit is out of control, and one woman won’t take it anymore. In the aftermath of a shooting in a Detroit barbershop that killed three people and wounded six on Nov. 6, Pastor Ovella Andreas mobilized other church leaders to figure out how to respond. “This is an emergency; this is a crisis, and we have to come together now to do what we can,” she told WWJ. “I truly know if we do what we can, God will do what we cannot; but we’re not doing all that we can.” So what did pastor Andreas and her task force decide to do? Simple. They will … bombard Detroit with “Thou Shalt Not Kill” banners and signs around the city with the hopes that seeing the sixth commandment everywhere will serve as a wake-up call to the community. “Our goal now is to infiltrate and saturate our communities with this commandment, via buses, via billboards,” Andreas said. Read more
