Author: Adam Lee

Last month, a religious fundamentalist attacked a gay-pride parade in Jerusalem, stabbing six people. One of them, a teenager named Shira Banki, later died from her wounds. The attacker, identified by police as Yishai Schlissel, is an ultra-Orthodox Jew who had previously stabbed three people at another gay-pride parade in Jerusalem in 2005, for which…

A late summer afternoon, when ripe sun and yellow-orange air holds the crackle of autumn hidden inside like corn in a husk. The drowsy heat makes languor a pleasant option, but there’s a road ahead that remains to be traveled before rest can come. Image credit: Olli Henze, released under CC BY-ND 2.0 license

Atlas Shrugged, part III, chapter II Last time, John Galt told Dagny that because she trespassed in his valley, he’s going to hold her there for a month, just because he wants to. He also tells her that he’s going to bill the account that Ragnar established for her at the Mulligan Bank for her…

I enjoyed this story by Dylan Matthews on Vox about effective altruism, an idea I’m all in favor of and wanted to say more about. EA is the philosophy that we should use science, rather than warm fuzzy feelings or guesswork, to direct our charitable giving where it will do the most good. Compared to…

Editors’ Note: This article is part of the Patheos Public Square on the Future of Faith in America: Humanism. Read other perspectives here. I’ve written about the future of religion and the coming secular era, but there’s another side to that coin. Namely, if religion is declining, what will happen to the non-religious? How will…

• Niloy Neel, a Bangladeshi atheist writer, is brutally murdered in his own home by Islamists. He’s the fourth secularist writer in Bangladesh to be assassinated this year, while the government continues to sit on its hands and do nothing. • Prayer can’t fight the Ebola virus. But science can. • Today in “why are…

Atlas Shrugged, part III, chapter II While Ragnar Danneskjold thinks of himself as a reverse Robin Hood, I think he’s more like the Objectivist Santa Claus. He comes down the chimney to give gold to all the good girls and boys of superlative individual value. He may not have a sleigh drawn by flying reindeer,…

My latest column on the Guardian is up: “There’s a silver lining in the religious right’s onslaught of discrimination“. From evangelical colleges to Catholic schools, America’s religious right is pulling out all the stops to keep enforcing their prejudices on others, even after Supreme Court rulings that went against them. In this column, I argue…

Following up on last week’s affray over cognitive dissonance in pro-LGBT Christians, I have one more point I want to make. Liberal and progressive believers have a variety of theological rationalizations for why they remain in a church that’s historically been an unrelenting enemy of people like them. One of the most common is that…

Two weeks from today, I’ll be speaking on Long Island about secular morality, courtesy of the Long Island Atheists Meetup Group. If you’re in the area, come out and see me! WHAT: Secular Morality in the Modern Age WHEN: Saturday, August 15, 2015, 4:00 PM WHERE: Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Central Nassau, 223 Stewart Avenue,…