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.
“A violation of my freedom of speech.” That’s how school bus driver George Nathaniel, who is also a pastor for two Minneapolis churches, sees his firing. Nathaniel was in his second year of bus driving. Despite an earlier warning from the transportation company that employed him, he never stopped inviting kids to pray with him on the way to school. After receiving a complaint from the district about the prayers, the bus company, Durham School Services, gave Nathaniel a warning and assigned him two new bus routes. … That didn’t dissuade Nathaniel. “I let them know I am a pastor and I am going to pray,” he said. Praying is fine, of course. However, if you’re an authority figure to children and you represent the school, as Nathaniel did, it’s against the law to do it out loud, invitation-style, on a school bus — a vehicle on which public-school kids are your captive audience. The First Amendment’s Establishment Clause says so. Read more
The group Thou Shall Not Move, which we last covered on this blog back in July, is at it again. Quick refresher: Indignant Christians formed TSNM after the Freedom From Religion Foundation sued a McConnellsville, Pennsylvania public school for unconstitutionally displaying a Ten Commandments monument. The monument is now covered up until the case is resolved in court. Meanwhile, TSNM is taking a stand against the mean old atheists by commissioning new monuments, one after the other, and triumphantly shipping them to towns across Pennsylvania. Hence, breaking news: The North Ten Mile Baptist Church in Amity will be the newest recipient of a 6-foot-by-3-foot, 1,600-pound granite monument engraved with the Old Testament’s Ten Commandments. Did you spot the mistake in “thinking” here? Read more
A new post by my very good friend and Patheos colleague Benjamin Corey, a preacher and blogger, shines a spotlight on the sad state of Christian moviemaking. One of his early-on conclusions: [M]any well-meaning Christian families who are making an honest attempt to let their children watch something good, might actually get duped into showing their kids crap. Evidently, Corey’s not alone. Since the days of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956) and Fred Zinnemann’s A Man For All Seasons (1966), Christian movie fare hasn’t exactly been burning up the box office. (In saying that, I realize I’m using box office receipts as a proxy for quality. Let me know if I’m missing any masterful Christian flicks by that admittedly imperfect criterion.) Here’s how bad it is: Read more
“I have known Larry and Carri to be loving parents with the ability to raise children appropriately,” Richard Long stated for the record. Long is the family pastor of Carri and Larry Williams. The Washington state couple had nine children — seven biological ones, plus two adopted from Ethiopia. Now there are eight; in 2011, adopted Hana Grace-Rose Williams, 13, died of starvation and hypothermia — the result of the parents’ sustained reign of terror that was inspired by a devoutly Christian book on disciplining kids. This summer a jury convicted the Williamses of denying their children Hana and Immanuel food, beating them and making them sleep in closets or washrooms. They were fed a diet of sandwiches that had been soaked in water and vegetables that were still frozen. Some of the couple’s seven biological children sometimes took part in the abuse. Read more
For decades now, scientists — at SETI and elsewhere — have been sending signals into space for the express purpose of contacting distant civilizations. We have yet to hear anything back. In this simple, beautiful, Saganesque musing on the vastness of space and time, singer/songwriter Peter Mulvey explores why — with an appreciative nod to his friend Vlad, an astrophysicist. Mulvey’s performance took place at the Kaufman Center in Kansas City, Missouri, this summer, as part of the TEDxKC conference. It isn’t an atheism-related video, per se, but its poetic emphasis on the insignificance of our “pale blue dot,” in the scheme of things, might give pause to theists who believe that Earth is the pinnacle of Creation: Read more
