Author: Adam Lee

My Patheos colleague Dan Fincke has proposed a civility pledge for people engaged in public discussion. I think his motivations are good, and most of the pledge is fine. I completely agree with his points about using specific charges rather than abusive epithets, about recognizing that members of marginalized groups may have experiences which I…

Zinnia Jones at Freethought Blogs had a great post last week exposing Matt Moore, an evangelical and so-called “ex-gay” who loudly boasted that Jesus had cured him of homosexuality. It turns out the cure wasn’t exactly complete, since Moore had an active profile on the gay hookup site Grindr. When confronted with the evidence of…

I first covered the Arab Spring just over two years ago, and since then, I’ve written about whether the revolutions were a setback for women’s rights, as well as the unresolved tension between democracy and Islamism among Arab populations. I didn’t report on events in the Middle East very much last year, since I thought…

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. The petition also attracted over 400 comments from people who wanted to further explain why they were signing. Most…

The most important thing we can teach teenagers about sex is that it has no magical, transformative power, contrary to the false ideas of both abstinence-obsessed fundamentalists and a sex-obsessed popular culture.

• No matter how many compromises the Obama administration offers, Catholic bishops just don’t want people to have access to birth control. • Beliefnet is afraid of feminism, telling liberal Christian pastor and blogger Kristine Holmgren that she wasn’t allowed to use the word in her header or her blog (at which point, to her…

New York City is still buried under today’s arctic blast, so let’s warm up with something up-tempo from one of my favorite rock bands, The Joy Formidable. I’ve been a fan since discovering their appropriately-titled first album, The Big Roar, at the beginning of last year, and now they have a brand-new one, Wolf’s Law.…

Making quality education more accessible to everyone, including people from poor and disadvantaged communities, is one of the best weapons atheists have in the fight to build a more rational society.

Atheist author Sam Harris argues that owning a gun is a moral imperative for personal protection, but he fails to take into account that the ordinary hazards of widespread gun ownership cost far more lives than attention-grabbing but extremely rare acts of criminality.

My latest column on Alternet, about the failed predictions of the religious right, has gotten a reply from a writer calling himself suburbXn who identifies himself as a liberal Christian, and who thinks I’m vastly exaggerating the influence of the people whose prophecies I cited: You can find extremists and crazies behind ANY belief who…