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.
Religious people can finally watch a ton of porn and feel pious about it. A little porn won’t do, but a lot of it might really deepen their commitment to religion. In the latest issue of the Journal of Sex Research, Sociologist Samuel L. Perry of the University of Oklahoma writes that, on the whole, the correlation between pornography use and religiosity runs as most of us probably expect: Read more
I don’t have the answers, but I sure have a lot of questions. Should all pupils in Germany’s state schools get educated in the tenets of Islam? If so, what version of Islam is the correct one that schoolchildren must internalize? Sunni Islam? Shiite Islam? Salafi Islam? Wahhabi Islam? Ahmadiyya Islam? Sunni Islam alone has five main sub-sects (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, Hanbalites, and Ẓāhirī), and all those f(r)actions have splinters. Who will decide, for the purposes of German schools, what the proper theology is? Read more
