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.
Two quick items related to religious weddings: Maybe not news, but news to me: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints wants U.S. members to marry in ceremonies that exclude literally everyone who is not an active Mormon adult. As an apparent form of spite, Mormons who want to have both a civil ceremony (that all their friends and relatives can attend) and a Church-sanctioned one (for sufficiently pious Mormon folk only) will have to wait a year for a temple marriage. Slate quotes a former Mormon, Jean Bodie, who knows whereof she speaks, having spent 35 years in that faith. “Rejecting and excluding your inactive or nonmember family is a mark of being a good Mormon,” she says unreservedly. For some Mormons, this means soul-searching, awkwardness, and some degree of social unpleasantness: [Click headline for more…] Read more
A few days ago, a commenter who goes by Susan_G1 brought up an interesting question in response to this post of mine. She addressed it to all frequent readers of the blog: It seems to be that you spend an inordinate amount of time defining yourselves as who/what you aren’t … instead of who/what you are. … Do you not have any better things to do than laugh at theists, or is this your primary identity? Susan wrote elsewhere that “I don’t think it’s a great idea to criticize Christian brothers and sisters in public,” and given that preference, I suspect that she is not going to find a whole lot to like on Friendly Atheist. Nonetheless, where readers could have jumped down her throat, more than a few answered her without getting overly defensive, and it turned into a halfway illuminating discussion in which both sides, overall, showed restraint and understanding. Pretty cool. [Click headline for more…] Read more
Remember the Gastonguays? This past May, 26-year-old Hannah, her 30-year-old husband Sean, his father Mike, and the couple’s daughters, 3-year-old Ardith and 8-month-old Rahab, planned to sail to Kiribati, a tiny island nation, population 100,000, some 1,300 miles south of Hawaii. They didn’t want to live in the increasingly godless United States anymore due to “abortion, homosexuality [and] the state-controlled church.” The five set sail for their exotic destination but were later found to have “zero knowledge and experience in navigation.” Inevitably, they suffered one mishap after another. With their boat badly battered after a string of Pacific squalls and storms plus a collision with a Canadian cargo ship, the family ran out of supplies but managed to survive on some juice, honey, and what fish they could catch. Then the deck started separating from the hull, and the boat filled with water constantly. After 91 days of half-sailing, half-drifting, a helicopter had to airlift them to safety. Now, the family says they want to try again… [Click headline for more…] Read more
Rabbi Adam Frank, based in Jerusalem, is a little embarrassed by Judaism’s chicken-twirling tradition. For those not in the know, Kapparot is a Jewish ritual, performed on the eve of Yom Kippur, in which a self-identified sinner swings a live chicken over his head three times, while reciting “This is my exchange, my substitute, my atonement.” What does that do, you ask? It transfers the person’s sins to the doomed bird. I swear I’m not making this up. Afterwards, the chicken is slaughtered — and YHWH, we are left to infer, is just pleased as punch. Frank says that the whole thing bothers him because he’s seen the birds get neglected, starved of food or water, in the days before it’s even time to swing and kill them. Also, he says, “Christianity took the idea of sacrificing a live something for the sake of humanity and Judaism finds that an anathema, and yet kapparot is that very thing — transferring sins onto a chicken and sacrificing it.” Good point. But most of all, I was heartened by this objection of his: [Click headline for more…] Read more
So here was the setup: Yesterday, I presented 15 brief descriptions of behaviors that were religious or spiritual in nature — some mainstream, some obscure. Three of them were fictional; the other 12 were real. Your job was to separate my fabrications from the things that people actually do to pay respect to their gods and spirits. Some readers thought the 15 bizarre practices were all made up. Rather than give them an “F,” I’ll let the gods take care of them. Be rueful and very afraid, oh ye of little faith! Others thought it was a trick question and that all 15 examples were real — and, to be honest, I’d toyed with that thought when I put the quiz together. In the end, however, it seemed more fun to concoct a few rituals of my own. So I did. Now let’s go down the list. [Click headline for more…] Read more
