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 love this blog, and that includes the often smart and funny commenters who enliven it. But I haven’t quite forgotten the chilling (and thankfully rare) occasions when the comments leaned in the direction of condoning violence, or even cheering it on. What about hitting a hateful street preacher over the head with a baseball bat? Can anyone here get on board with that? I’m actually a little afraid to find out the answer. Read more
In a newspaper piece that’s short on facts but long on hubris, writer Janet Street-Porter alleges that the majority of her fellow Britons only think they have no religious faith. Porter, a 69-year-old Anglican and an editor-at-large of the Independent on Sunday, is in a snit over the recent news that the percentage of the non-religious in England and Wales has nearly doubled in recent years. The people in those two countries who are atheists, agnostics, or “nothing in particular” now outnumber the local Christian population. Read more
Christians are a minority in Egypt, making up only about 10 percent of the population. As we’ve seen so often, religious majorities tend to roughshod over numerically weaker faith groups… and so it was in this case. “A 70-year-old Christian woman [below, center, meeting with church elders] [was] stripped naked, beaten and paraded through the streets by a mob of around 300 Muslim men in a village in southern Egypt.” Read more
One feature shared by patriarchal religions is that men are often trying to figure out how hard and with what objects they may hit “inferior” people like their children or wives. It is in that proud tradition that, even in the twenty-first century (or, fittingly, in the fifteenth century if you’re a Muslim), some prominent adherents of Islam still advocate wife-beating as a matter of theology. Read more
