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’d like your opinion on this: Sports commentator Ralph Gurdy was recently fired from an NBC affiliate for saying — not on the air, but during a public function unrelated to his TV work — that gay people are born that way and that there’s nothing wrong with same-sex marriage. That’s pretty weird and outrageous, isn’t it? It didn’t actually happen (I made it up as a thought experiment; there is no Ralph Gurdy who’s a talking head for NBC), but this did: Sports commentator Craig James (pictured below) was fired from a regional Fox outfit because he was “not a good fit” and a “polarizing figure in the college sports community.” Fox also said that James, who had just one on-air performance before he was kicked out, had not been “properly vetted.” So far, so uninteresting, but the problem lies in a further statement made to the Dallas Morning News by an unidentified Fox spokesperson who referred to James’s unsuccessful Senate run, during which the candidate said that being gay is a choice and that gay people will have to answer to God. [Click headline for more…] Read more
This, too, is the face of religion. After the four-day Islamist siege of the Westgate Shopping Center in Nairobi, Kenya, soldiers and first responders came upon a scene seemingly straight out of Saw or the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Hostages were left hanging and had their eyes gouged, others were dismembered. Others had their throats slashed or were castrated and had fingers amputated, according to media reports quoting soldiers, medical personnel and investigators sorting through the rubble of the collapsed mall. A doctor and forensics expert who examined some of the victims angrily described the unimaginable savagery: [Click headline for more…] Read more
Almost six in ten Americans believe the devil is real, and more than half think people can be possessed by demons. Those results are from a recent YouGov poll of 1,000 respondents, though it’s not clear how reliable the numbers are — I couldn’t find an explanation of the methodology. YouGov says its poll has a margin of error of three percent. When you drill down past the headline and summary, you can see which religious adherents are most likely to believe that Satan exists. To no one’s surprise, those who have had a “born-again” experience top the list at 86%. The Lord of Darkness is met with a lot more skepticism in non-Christian circles: only 17% of Jews and 25% of Muslims believe that he’s real, as do 20 percent of Nones. [Click headline for more…] Read more
42-year-old Ahmet Muhsin Tüzer is a Turkish imam who likes rock music. In his spare time, he sings in a band, and it isn’t exactly death metal — more like the Islamic equivalent of Christian rock, and more pap pop than rock at that: Mr Tüzer … is planning to bring out an album with his band next month. One song is titled Mevlaya gel, or Come to God. “I want to celebrate Allah in every place,” he told Turkey’s Anadolu news agency. “I don’t think I have caused the slightest damage to my institution.” But the Turkish government — officially secular, but deeply entangled with Islam — recently launched an investigation against Tüzer, because being an imam “is not just like any other job,” a spokesman explained. “Things that are viewed as normal when it comes to other civil servants are viewed differently with respect to imams.” [Click headline for more…] Read more
