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.
Are you prepared for the onslaught of atheist babies who go around murdering other people? That’s the doomsday scenario sketched in an apparently dead-serious anti-atheism editorial that just got published in as many as seven Bugle newspapers, all small-town Illinois weeklies. The writer fantasizes about two “atheist babies” (an oxymoron: all babies are atheists) who get marooned on opposite sides of an island. One infant is found and raised by kindly Christians. The other child is reared by the Christians’ godless counterparts: a pack of wolves. Wait — what? [Click headline for more…] Read more
Herb Silverman of the Secular Coalition for America writes an always-entertaining weekly column for the On Faith section of the Washington Post. Today’s piece focuses on whether atheists, as a group, are as arrogant as many believers like to say we are. His argument isn’t new, but it’s very effectively stated: [Click headline for more…] Read more
Until this year, all state schools in Israel used the same science books. Heading into the new school year, however, that will no longer be the case, as the government has decided that religious schools deserve their own science books, which will be dumbed down for students’ spiritual protection. In the United States, the state censorship of textbooks has focused mostly on suppressing political ideas and boosting the unintelligent notion of Intelligent Design. In Israel, it’s mostly the human body — the female human body, in particular — that has caused a case of cooties at the highest levels, such that a chapter on reproduction will be deleted, along with references to menstruation. [Click headline for more…] Read more
