Author: Adam Lee

I’ve just gotten home from Salt Lake City, where I was at the 2014 annual convention of American Atheists. AA always has their convention on Easter weekend (and after all, what better weekend would there be for an atheist not to have other plans?), and this year gave us a double dose of cheekiness by…

A few years ago, I wrote about the horrible “witch children” craze in Nigeria. Like the witch hunts that once swept through America and Europe, this one is fed by sects of fanatic evangelical preachers, inflamed by Western missionaries, that believe in a miracle-drenched, demon-haunted world – and teach that people, including children, can be…

Atlas Shrugged, part II, chapter I The last few industrialists of Colorado are disappearing, and the John Galt Line has been reduced to mostly-empty trains pulled by rickety, coal-burning locomotives. Having run out of leads in her quest for the magic motor, Dagny has finally resorted to contacting Robert Stadler. He comes to New York…

In 2009, I wrote “The Twisted Moral of Passover“, about how this major Jewish holiday is really a celebration of genocide: the mass killing of the Egyptian children that preceded the Israelites’ deliverance from slavery. (The very name of the holiday refers to how the Israelite slaves supposedly marked their doors with blood so that…

Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, Episode 6, “Deeper, Deeper, Deeper Still” After the last two strong episodes, there was bound to be a clunker sooner or later, and I’m sorry to say this was it. Although it elaborated on a theme of the microscopic, atomic and sub-atomic worlds, it lacked a central narrative thread to tie…

As you probably know, I don’t believe in the efficacy of prayer. There’s neither empirical evidence nor logical argument to support the proposition that a supernatural being is listening to our requests and can be persuaded to grant them if asked politely enough. Still, when believers pray for the healing of the sick or the…

Atlas Shrugged, part II, chapter I After a brief detour through the glorious disaster that was the Atlas Shrugged: Part I movie, we’re ready to dive into the second part of the book. When we last checked in, Ellis Wyatt had blown up his oil wells and vanished. Part II raises the curtain at the…

In 2005, the then-county executive of New York’s Nassau County, Thomas Suozzi, gave a speech at Adelphi University in which he expressed the hope to find “common ground” on reproductive choice: “As a Democrat, I do not often find it easy to talk with other Democrats about our need to affirm our commitment to the…

Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, Episode 5, “Hiding in the Light” With computer graphics getting cheaper and better every year, every new TV show and movie has to grapple with the question of how much is too much. That’s no less true for a hard-science series like Cosmos than it is for a sci-fi drama. There’s…

Last week, the open enrollment period for Obamacare officially ended, and a major goal has been reached: about 7.1 million people signed up for insurance on the exchanges. This surpasses the CBO’s initial estimate of 7 million enrollments (which, I should note, was lowered to 6 million after the botched rollout of Healthcare.gov). It’s important…