Author: Adam Lee

Atlas Shrugged, part II, chapter II The time has come for the first of The Speeches. These are Ayn Rand’s infamous filibusters in which the action comes to a halt so that one of her characters can deliver a lengthy philosophical lecture expounding their author’s views. The speech in this chapter is one of the…

In the wake of the mass shooting in California last month, committed by a killer who left a long, misogynist manifesto vowing to punish women for not dating him, many pundits and commenters have strained to blame something other than sexism for his rampage. The most common claim is that the shooter, Elliot Rodger, was…

Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, Episode 12, “The World Set Free” For its penultimate episode, Cosmos returns to the subject of climate science, a familiar variation on a sermon it’s already preached more than once. I have some mixed feelings about this. With the series pressing against time constraints, I worry about the lost opportunities that…

My latest column is up on AlterNet, Why Do Many Christians Still Literally Believe in Demons and Satan? In it, I sum up the Harvard Black Mass fracas and place it in a wider context, showing how Pope Francis and the Catholic church are pushing a major revival of belief in the demonic. Read the…

Atlas Shrugged, part II, chapter II All the movers and shakers, including Hank and Lillian, have showed up for James Taggart’s wedding in New York. Dagny is also there, and obviously she and Hank have to keep up the pretense that there’s nothing between them. This makes Hank grit his teeth at his inability to,…

I’m coming late to the subject, but I wanted to circle back and talk about the Supreme Court’s ruling in Town of Greece v. Galloway, where a 5-4 conservative majority held that official prayers before town meetings are constitutionally permissible. Make no mistake, this is a bad ruling, although not as bad as it could…

When I wrote about atheism’s MRA problem, I wrote that it was imperative to drive these sexists off because of the harm they do through harassment and threats against women. Now there’s a much more graphic and horrible example of the threat posed by misogynists: a mass shooting in the California town of Isla Vista…

Atlas Shrugged, part II, chapter II Following his illegal meeting with Ken Danagger, Hank Rearden is still in his hotel room in New York, eagerly anticipating a night of adulterous sex with Dagny, when he has a surprise visitor: When the door of his room flew open without warning, he did not quite hear or…

Last December, I debated Andrew Murtagh at the Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I’m pleased to announce that this weekend we’re holding a part 2, this time on Long Island, New York. If you’re in the area, come out and see us! The sparks will fly (in a friendly way, of course) as we go…

I was at Women in Secularism 3 this last weekend, a fantastic and nearly flawless conference put on by the Center for Inquiry. I greatly enjoyed every part of it (including Ron Lindsay’s opening speech). I intend to write a longer report later, but first: On a Sunday panel, there was a question from an…