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.
Perhaps because you can’t say Dixon without saying dick, the local Christian Scientists in Dixon, Illinois, decided to build a church in the shape of a cock and balls. The architectural drawings must have been hawt — and now, thanks to Google Earth, we can all enjoy the borderline X-rated view from above: Read more
Last Sunday morning, at a time when Christians across America were shuffling into their church pews, I also thought about God. More specifically, my thoughts centered on the senselessness and pain surrounding the death of Maria Kislo, a 12-year-old Polish girl who, the U.K. Mirror reported, recently hanged herself to get into heaven. According to the British newspaper, Maria (or Marysia, as her name is rendered in the Polish press) missed her father, who had died in 2009. Allegedly, she left the following suicide note: Dear Mom. Please don’t be sad. I just miss Daddy so much, I want to see him again. As I should have done, some readers doubted the story I relayed, pointing out that it was unsourced and published in a tabloid, a genre known for sensationalism, spin, and shortcuts. I used to think that even tabloids didn’t descend into outright fabrications. In retrospect, that’s pretty naïve. It appears that over in England, making stuff up out of whole cloth is not unheard of among the writers and editors practicing tabloid journalism. How else to explain that, most crucially, neither the existence of the suicide note nor Marysia’s belief in heaven can be corroborated? I want to be clear about this lest I err in the other direction: It’s possible that the story as reported in the Mirror (and the Daily Mail) is correct. But absent any actual evidence, I now consider that possibility remote. Read more
A judge in Tennessee is set to receive a well-deserved rap on the knuckles for mixing her religious views with the affairs of the state. Magistrate Lu Ann Ballew undid a couple’s decision to name its baby Messiah, on the grounds that “The word ‘messiah’ is a title, and it’s a title that has only been earned by one person, and that one person is Jesus Christ.” Read more
If heaven is a better place where you’ll be reunited in great happiness with all the dead people you once loved… well, what’s to prevent bereaved and impressionable people from offing themselves — and gaining a one-way ticket to paradise? I got something in my eye when I read this heartbreaking news story of a 12-year-old girl who missed her deceased father so much that she hanged herself to be with him. My heart goes out to her mother and brother, and to all who loved her. Read more
A new academic study appears to show that people who say religion is really important to them are also more likely to lie if it benefits them financially. The same is true for business majors and for children of divorced parents. As for the religious being more dishonest, …[t]he lead researcher [Associate Professor of Economics Jason Childs, at Canada’s University of Regina] hypothesizes that this “really strange effect” is the result of the faithful feeling less kinship with the secular, and ultimately less concern about screwing them over for a few bucks. The study will be published in the December issue of the journal Economics Letters. How was it conducted? The research team randomly split four hundred people into pairs, and asked each pair to conduct a simple money transaction. Read more
