Author: Adam Lee

• A can’t-miss account of Charlie Hebdo‘s first editorial meeting since last week’s horrific attack. • One-man outrage band Bill Donohue didn’t kill anyone at Charlie Hebdo, but he’s understanding and sympathetic towards the Muslims who did. They made fun of the Pope, after all! • “The right to blaspheme religion is one of the…

Atlas Shrugged, part II, chapter VIII Francisco asks Dagny what she thinks about the men who quit their jobs and vanished, and she says she can’t blame them anymore, that she now feels the same way even if it’s psychological torture for her to walk off the job. He says that he’s been through this…

While trying to absorb the awful, awful news out of Paris this morning, I kept thinking of this passage from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, addressed to the poet’s detractors: But yours the cold heart, and the murderous tongue, The wintry soul that hates to hear a song, The close-shut fist, the mean and measuring…

I’ve published a new column on the Guardian: “If peace on earth is our goal, atheism might be the means to that end“. From the Russian invasion of Ukraine, to the disintegration of Syria, to the atrocities of Islamic State and Boko Haram, it sometimes seems as if the world is spiraling down a vortex…

Steve Neumann, one of my colleagues on the Patheos atheist channel, has written an essay titled “The Case Against In-Your-Face Atheism” which argues that the firebrand style of atheist advocacy does more harm than good. Since he quotes me in it, I thought I’d offer a reply. This is his definition of firebrand atheism: The…

Here’s some welcome news to start out 2015: Lee Strobel, the famed Christian apologist, says that atheism is winning and evangelical Christianity is “facing a crisis”: “We are facing a crisis in America. Skepticism is rising. Too many young people are leaving the faith. Few Christians are able to effectively share Jesus with others,” Strobel…

Atlas Shrugged, part II, chapter VIII Happy New Year! If you haven’t already seen it, here’s an article that’s worth a laugh: an Ayn Rand acolyte pens an editorial in the Washington Post explaining how to have a properly selfish Objectivist Christmas, and why the holiday season is really about gratifying your own desires rather…

As 2014 draws to a close, it’s time for the annual wrapup. Here are the major threads that I kept returning to on Daylight Atheism over the past year: The New Civil Rights In January, I reviewed Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, the most important book in American politics of the last decade, about…

This is part 9 of my “Think! Of God and Government” debate series with Christian author Andrew Murtagh. Read my latest post and Andrew’s reply. Hello Andrew, Just to briefly return to our previous topic, on Heaven and the problem of evil: If you say you don’t know why God does or doesn’t do X,…

Atlas Shrugged, part II, chapter VIII When the villains put Directive 10-289 into effect two chapters earlier, Dagny quit her job and flounced out. This chapter opens with her living in hermetic solitude, at an old rural cabin in Woodstock that she inherited: The sun touched the tree tops on the slope of the hill,…