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.
“We’re all mentally ill,” declared megachurch pastor Rick Warren this past weekend, when he returned to the pulpit 16 weeks after his 27-year-old son Matthew, who had mental-health problems, fatally shot himself. In his sermon, aimed at lessening the stigma of mental illness, Warren said, In any other organ of your body there’s no shame or stigma if it breaks down… But if your brain doesn’t work, why are you ashamed of that? Why should there by any stigma attached to that? It’s just as much a part of your body as your heart and your liver. Quite. I fell prey to clinical depression myself in 2006, an ordeal I won’t soon forget. Despite the patience and support of my wife and the sweet presence of our four-year-old daughter, I existed in bleakness and misery — laboring under a heavy, oppressive miasma that wouldn’t lift until, nine months in, physicians got my brain chemistry under control with medication that worked, in doses that provided permanent (?) relief from thoughts of suicide. As a former depression sufferer, I applaud Warren’s words as true and well-spoken. But he probably didn’t do the cause any favors when he explained what he meant by “We’re all mentally ill.” This is how he followed that remark: [Click headline for more…] Read more
It must be hard for believers to keep up with all the perfectly arbitrary requirements of their religion — eat this, don’t eat that; wear this, don’t wear that, and on and on. Luckily, holy men will help guide the confused, so that God doesn’t get too cranky. And so it was that rabbis from the Rabbinical Council of California came to inspect a 52,000 square foot production plant in Valencia, California, to examine the origins of every ingredient used in the manufacture of a brand of lubricant called Wet (link probably NSFW). The burning (or is that tingling?) question was whether the lube made there would become the first to be declared kosher. Says the company in a press release, As recorded in the book of Deuteronomy over 3200 years ago, Moses gave us The Ten Commandments and the Kosher laws. Since then, we’ve had Kosher hot dogs, Kosher wine and Kosher matzoh. But now, thanks to Trigg Labs, Wet® personal lubricants and intimacy products are also Kosher! Yay! [Click headline for more…] Read more
Fred Phelps’ mother is having a grand old time in Heaven. How do we know this? Because gay people have been kissing over her gravesite. Every time that happens, the deceased receives an orgasm in the afterlife, provided that the grave has been been the subject of a Pink Mass. A Pink Mass turns the dead person gay, very much like the Mormon practice of baptizing the dead. Only much gayer. The idea and phraseology come from the Satanic Temple of New York, whose leaders located the grave of the Westboro Baptist Church’s head bigot, made a pilgrimage to that Mississippi location, and turned Phelps’ mother into a lesbian (posthumously) by performing the Pink Mass. [Click headline for more…] Read more
When it comes to the pernicious influence of religion, I consider myself fortunate to live in the western world. I get to write about the Evansville crosses without any fear of Christian mobs administering a beating. I can say what I want about the disgusting and disgraceful practice of ritual baby-penis-sucking among Hasidic Brooklyn Jews, and no armed posse of YHWH fans is going to come to my home to teach me a lesson. I may publish whatever strikes me as truthful about the so-called prophet Muhammad without incensed Islamists threatening to butcher m–oh, wait, not that one. I forgot: Islam is special. … No organization drives home the point quite as well as the degenerate Nigerian group Boko Haram, whose name means “Western education is sinful.” So Boko Haram’s fighters love targeting schools and students, in a series of loathsome acts not seen since Muslim terrorists killed almost 400 pupils and teachers in Beslan. [Click headline for more…] Read more
