Author: Adam Lee

There’s more good news in the saga of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, an especially nasty totalitarian religious cult that splintered off from Mormonism. The sect’s former ruler, Warren Jeffs, is serving a life sentence for facilitating rape, and his absence seems to be destabilizing them. As I wrote last year,…

As long as reproductive choice is under threat in the United States, there’ll be a need for the National Abortion Access Bowl-a-Thon. This year, the stakes are especially high, as Catholic hospitals continue to deny critical care to pregnant and miscarrying women, and the Supreme Court will soon hear a case over a dreadful, bad-faith…

Atlas Shrugged, part III, chapter VIII The looters have captured John Galt. Given their incompetence at everything, including villainy, you might think they’d construct a prison that he could just walk out of, Idiocracy-style, or even one that he could stage a daring escape from. However, because the narrative now demands it, this turns out…

I dream of the day when this blog is obsolete. It’s not that I’m tired of writing for Daylight Atheism. I’ve been doing it for ten years, and I could easily carry on for another ten. But I wish there was no longer a need for it. Writing about atheism, in a way, is boring:…

Despite its public image as the faith of kindly Pope Francis, Roman Catholicism still enforces cruel, medieval rules that kill women. Witness this story from the Guardian on how Catholic hospitals’ abortion ban forces women to endure life-threatening infections: The woman inside the ambulance was miscarrying… As the vehicle wailed toward the hospital, a doctor…

• Last month, I wrote about Richard Dawkins being disinvited from NECSS for sexist comments. I’m disappointed but, in a sign of my cynicism, not overly surprised that NECSS has caved in and reinvited him. Needless to say, I won’t be attending. Ophelia has more, and a follow-up. • In happier news, scientists at the…

Atlas Shrugged, part III, chapter VIII The looter government’s radio appeals to John Galt are getting desperate. They promise to meet whatever terms he sets, to follow any orders he gives if he’ll just help them, but there’s no hint of an answer. The bad guys keep badgering Dagny in the (entirely justified and accurate)…

The Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon is back where it belongs: in the hands of the American people, free for everyone to use and enjoy. The month-long occupation by white Christian terrorists ended in utterly mundane fashion, with most of the militants taken into custody at a traffic stop as they attempted to travel…

Antonin Scalia has died. The news broke on Saturday night while I was at the movies watching Deadpool (seriously). It was such a sudden and unexpected shock, such a bolt from the clear blue, that at first I had trouble believing it was for real. It brought irresistibly to mind Clarence Darrow’s quip that while…

I spent this weekend doing some cultural stuff in New York City, including a visit to the American Museum of Natural History to see their new exhibit: the skeleton of an enormous dinosaur from Argentina, one of the largest ever discovered. This species is so new it doesn’t even have a proper scientific name yet,…