Author: Adam Lee

Atlas Shrugged, part I, chapter IX Leaving Hank and Dagny for a little while, we turn to a scene in Connecticut: The silhouette of a conveyor belt moved against the strips of fire in the sky, raising coal to the top of a distant tower, as if an inexhaustible number of small black buckets rode…

In most of the Western world, today is Christmas Day. We rationalists know that, despite the meandering of the calendar and all the religious mythology that’s become encrusted on it, this date was first chosen for its astronomical significance. The winter solstice is an inflection point, after which ancient people knew dark days would brighten…

The dominoes keep falling in the U.S., as this month courts ruled in favor of marriage equality in New Mexico and Utah (!!). Until this decision, New Mexico was the only state that had no law either permitting or prohibiting same-sex marriage, creating a legal ambiguity that the state’s highest court has now resolved. But…

There’s a lot of fantasy fiction that I enjoy in spite of its religious themes – C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series, or Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. But sometimes I’m in the mood for fiction that takes an explicitly atheist and humanist point of view, which is why I’ve lately been rereading one of my…

Atlas Shrugged, part I, chapter IX As the next chapter begins, we fade in on Dagny waking up in bed with Hank, the two of them still in Ellis Wyatt’s house: She looked at the glowing bands on the skin of her arm, spaced like bracelets from her wrist to her shoulder. They were strips…

This past weekend, I was at the Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania for my first ever in-person debate, part of the “Think! Of God and Government” debate series I’m having with Christian author Andrew Murtagh. The Midtown Scholar is a huge, gorgeous independent bookstore – I’m told it used to be a movie theater –…

Last month, Universities UK, an umbrella organization representing institutions of higher education in the United Kingdom, published guidelines for how colleges could host controversial speakers on campus in a way that respects both free-speech and anti-discrimination laws. Among their case studies was the hypothetical example of a fundamentalist religious speaker who wanted his audience to…

In my previous Friday Night Music posts, I’ve just been sharing artists I like, with no overarching theme. But this is Daylight Atheism, after all, and it’s about time I featured an explicitly atheist musician! I’ll be the first to say that I don’t usually like what you might call “message music”, but Shelley Segal…

Atlas Shrugged, part I, chapter VIII After Dagny and Hank’s train rolls in triumph into Wyatt Junction, Ellis Wyatt invites the two of them to his house for a celebratory dinner. While they eat, he encourages Hank Rearden to move to Colorado (“This is the capital of the Renaissance”) and lets them in on his…

Although the media has been thrilled by some symbolic statements about poverty by Pope Francis, the inconvenient fact remains that he’s changed none of the doctrines that were the biggest reason for atheists to object to Catholicism in the first place. Last week in Michigan, we saw another example of that: Tamesha Means, the plaintiff…