Author: Adam Lee

In January, I created a petition calling on atheists to show their support for feminism and diversity. That petition, with more than 2,000 signatures, was delivered to the leaders of the largest atheist and secular organizations at the end of January. The petition also attracted over 400 comments from people who wanted to further explain…

• As you all know, there’s a new pope in town: Jorge Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires. He talks a good game on poverty, although like all Catholic hierarchs, he doesn’t seem to grasp that his opposition to birth control perpetuates the very problem he claims to want solved. As if there was any doubt,…

(See part 1 here.) Primitive Warfare As part of the sex-as-social-glue hypothesis, SaD asserts that pre-state societies were universally peaceful. The book argues that in a hunter-gatherer society with no possessions and no fixed resource base, rival groups would have nothing to fight about [p.183]. But this claim flies in the face of the evidence.…

Summary: An interesting but sloppy argument that would have been much improved by more careful use of evolutionary reasoning. Sex at Dawn, by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha, is a bestselling science book that sets out to present a radically new model of human prehistory. The authors’ thesis is that, prior to the invention of…

My article last week on the increasing problem of church-owned hospitals sparked a debate that I want to address in more detail. Several religious commenters were aghast at the idea that a doctor should have to perform an abortion even if it went against his personal beliefs, like this one from commenter Cheri: Do I…

Yesterday was International Women’s Day, so in honor of that, all the links in this week’s roundup are feminist-themed. And there’s a lot of news to cover: • Anita Sarkheesian of Feminist Frequency has released the first in her Tropes vs Women in Video Games series, exploring the cliche of the damsel in distress. (Hilariously,…

I’ve written a lot about the child-abuse coverup by the hierarchy of the Catholic church, but not because I believe Roman Catholicism is the only religion guilty of these crimes. Far from it! Any religion that preaches the virtues of submission and obedience is inherently vulnerable to abuses of this kind. When religious leaders are…

Earlier today, I was on a radio show hosted by Jesse Lee Peterson, an ultra-right-wing black conservative minister who’s defended slavery and advocated an end to women’s suffrage. We talked about how I became an atheist, my book, and my petition to advance feminism and diversity in the atheist community. You’d better believe it was…

This article was originally published on AlterNet. Last year in Ireland, Savita Halappanavar died, and she shouldn’t have. Savita was a 31-year-old married woman, four months pregnant, who went to the hospital with a miscarriage in progress that developed into a blood infection. She could easily have been saved by an abortion of the already-doomed…

This Thursday, March 7, I’m being interviewed for the Jesse Lee Peterson Radio Show. And if you don’t know who Jesse Lee Peterson is, well, see for yourself. I’m told they want to talk to me about my petition regarding feminism and diversity in the atheist community, and I have a pretty good idea of…