Author: Adam Lee

• My wife Elizabeth is raising funds for the National Abortion Access Bowl-a-Thon, and has just one week left and less than $200 to raise to get to her goal of $1,000. Help out! • And if you need some motivation, anti-choicers are harassing and terrorizing the staff of the newly reopened family-planning clinic in…

Here’s a little music for your Friday night, courtesy of one of my favorite bands, The Duke Spirit. It’s English rock with a touch of blues and soul, fronted by lead singer Liela Moss, who’s got one of those classic, timeless voices that sounds like it would fit in any decade. They’ve put out three…

Atlas Shrugged, p.25-32 After solving her little railroad problem, Dagny returns to New York to report to her brother, Jim, on the state of the decaying Rio Norte Line. She proposes rebuilding it – actually, that’s not right. She’s already placed the orders to start rebuilding it, without consulting anyone. More, she’s canceled their contract…

In my post on Monday, I said I’d write an update if I found out about anything else that could be done to help the Bangladeshi bloggers imprisoned for their atheism. I have a few more suggestions for how to do that. The International Humanist and Ethical Union is promoting the #HumanistSolidarity hashtag on Twitter…

I just finished reading Sex at Dusk, independent scholar Lynn Saxon’s reply to Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha’s book Sex at Dawn, which I reviewed last month. This book fills in the biggest gap in my original review, so I wanted to say some more about it. When I originally read Dawn, I thought that…

I’ve been getting more and more worried by the news coming out of Bangladesh, where there’s a climate of steadily increasing hostility and hate against nonbelievers. Earlier this year, there were violent riots against “blasphemous” internet posts, and one explicitly atheist blogger was murdered outside his own home. But as bad as that was, in…

Atlas Shrugged, p. 20-25 The first of the novel’s protagonists whom we meet is Dagny Taggart, the operating vice-president of Taggart Transcontinental and, as we quickly learn, the power behind the throne that keeps the railroad running. Actually, we first meet Dagny in a flashback, although not by name. She’s a childhood friend of poor,…

Earlier this year, the heads of major atheist and secular organizations met to discuss the future direction of the movement, including the role that feminism should play. Now those groups have published a joint open letter to the secular community from the proceeds of their meeting, calling for greater civility and more constructive dialog in…

Before I went away for the weekend, my attention was taken up by a a minor disagreement I had with Melissa McEwan at Shakesville. Since some of my experiences at the American Atheists convention bear on that, and since McEwan has written a further post about it, I wanted to write a followup. As I…

I’m writing this in the airport, on my way home from a weekend in Austin, Texas for the 50th anniversary convention of American Atheists. New York is all bare gray branches, still; it’s too early in the season even for buds. By comparison, Austin was a startling riot of green, with tree-lined streets and forested…