Author: Adam Lee

In 2000, the Supreme Court ruled that the Boy Scouts of America, as a private membership-based organization, had the right to discriminate against gay people by expelling them or barring them from joining. Since then, the BSA has been enforcing that policy with gusto, expelling gay and lesbian scouts and scout leaders all over the…

As I’m writing this post, NASA’s latest Mars mission – the Mars Science Laboratory, also known as Curiosity – is just hours away from its destination. By the time you read this, we’ll know if it touched down safely on the surface of the red planet. Curiosity is a robot rover about the size of…

On Friday afternoon, I got a call on my cell phone from an 800 number I didn’t recognize. I let it go to voicemail, and I’m glad I did, because that means I had a recording of this wonderfully bizarre call so I could transcribe and share it with you: God bless you, this is…

Last month, AlterNet published a column by James Rohrer, a history professor and self-identified progressive religious believer who had some unkind words for the New Atheists. I’d like to take the opportunity to respond here and to show how his essay partakes of many of the same fallacies that have ensured the religious right’s dominance…

Summary: A solid, informative history of the rise of the American secular movement. Books like Jennifer Michael Hecht’s Doubt: A History or Susan Jacoby’s Freethinkers show how brave nonbelievers have always existed, even in theocratic societies that were implacably hostile to their views. In most cases, persecution prevented those isolated sparks from joining together into…

Well, here’s an announcement! My first-ever original article for Salon has just been published, “Rise of the new atheists: Should non-believers make an alliance with religious progressives?” In it, I discuss the meteoric growth of nonbelief in America, why the so-called New Atheists think it’s a legitimate and useful tactic to criticize all religion equally,…

When it comes to debating the merits of religion, we atheists have an unfair advantage. Lately, almost every day when I go to work, there are Jehovah’s Witnesses in the subway station. I see them in the morning and the evening, two or three of them sitting on folding chairs in the sweltering, grimy heat,…

A few weeks ago, I posted a video of “Satellite,” the first single from Anna Dagmar‘s newest album of the same title. I first saw her play at a concert on Long Island, and not only did I love the song, I thought the subject matter would make it perfect to feature on my blog.…

On Tuesday, Monsignor William Lynn, former secretary of clergy for the Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia, was sentenced to three to six years in prison for his role in shielding pedophile priests from the law and reassigning them to positions where they could harm more children. At least one boy suffered years of sexual abuse at…

(more info here) The majority of paper mail I get is from people asking me for money. Political candidates from every state, advocacy groups, seemingly every charity under the sun, museums, parks, orchestras, even religious groups. But probably the most surprising solicitation I’ve gotten to date was a letter from the U.S. Olympic Committee, asking…