Author: Adam Lee

The Big Think editors have written an official reply to my post criticizing their decision to hire Satoshi Kanazawa. Whatever else I may think of that choice, I appreciate that they took my concerns seriously enough to write this lengthy explanation of their reasoning. I encourage you to go and read it first. That said,…

Ron Lindsay, president of the Center for Inquiry, wrote a column about Atheism Plus. I think he has some valid points, but also some concerns that I think are misguided. Here’s my reply to those points I found most noteworthy. But if hate-filled comments and threats to women have not been expressly called divisive, it’s…

So, here’s something you should know about me: I really don’t care for racists. A few years ago, a simpering neo-Nazi named Kevin Alfred Strom wrote to me, having somehow acquired the delusion that I would be his friend. I handled him rather roughly, I can tell you, though I like to think it was…

In my previous post, I discussed how the invention of government led to a major reduction in the level of violence in human civilization, as compared to the constant battles of tribal societies. But while democracy, laws and police forces can account for most of the decline, they can’t account for all of it. To…

I’m home again after my swing through the U.K., and I’ve finally had time to go through all the pictures I took. Here are a few of the best from our first few days in London: We got a taste of real English weather on our first day there, but the second day favored us…

I’ve written in the past about the Secret, more properly called the Law of Attraction, the perenially popular New Age idea which says that merely thinking about something draws it to you and causes it to appear in your life. One consistent aspect of this idea is that its advocates claim it’s an invariable natural…

If you have a Facebook account, you have an opportunity this month to help out two worthy secular organizations in a big, big way. The Secular Student Alliance and Camp Quest have both been nominated for the Chase Community Giving program, in which Chase gives out $5 million to the charities that win the most…

So, here’s the question for today: How should we respond when people we admire make serious missteps? Just so there’s no confusion, I want to say right up front that Richard Dawkins fully deserves his reputation as a great scientist and a communicator of science. One of my favorite book memories was the happy summer…

The most famous human being of prehistoric times is probably Otzi the Iceman, a Neolithic human whose mummified body was discovered frozen in a glacier in the Alps in 1991. What’s less well known about Otzi is that he met his death violently: an arrowhead was lodged in his back, and he was carrying an…

Last week, Jen McCreight announced that she was fed up with sexism in the atheist movement and called for a new wave of atheist activism, one explicitly concerned with social justice, which quickly acquired the name “atheism+“. These posts landed like a cannon shell, generating a huge wave of excitement and feedback – the vast…