Author: Adam Lee

I wrote in May about the legalization of civil unions in Delaware (which has now been signed into law), and the ongoing push to pass a marriage-equality law in my own state, New York. Although New York already recognizes same-sex marriages performed in any of the neighboring states that allow them, passage of the bill…

This week, my first article on Alternet was published, which spurred several comments asking that we not forget about libertarian and conservative atheists. That’s why it’s so amusing that this same week, PZ Myers points out the curious tale of a pundit named Jeff Sparrow, who’s convinced that the New Atheist movement is so right-wing…

Today I’m very happy to announce that I’ve become a contributor to AlterNet, the award-winning online progressive news and opinion magazine. My first essay is titled “There Are 10 Times As Many Atheists as Mormons: When Will Non-Believers Become a Political Force?” Read an excerpt below, and then click through to see the rest: The…

As I’ve mentioned, my wife and I took a trip to Spain last month to celebrate our first anniversary. I’m not going to inflict all my vacation photos on you, but we did see some sights that are relevant to the kind of thing I usually write about on Daylight Atheism. If you’re interested in…

You may have heard about this bizarre story out of Texas this week, where a self-proclaimed psychic called police with a tip that a certain home was the site of a mass grave containing dozens of dismembered bodies, including the bodies of children. A swarm of reporters, FBI agents and Texas Rangers promptly converged on…

I’ve been following this debate between Ross Douthat and Kevin Drum about the morality of assisted suicide. In his latest post, Douthat made a telling, though apparently unintentional, statement: The slippery slope that I discussed in the column doesn’t amount to much if you don’t disapprove at all of people deciding to take their own…

This is another story that broke while I was away in Spain, but I wanted to write about it. I’m sure it will no longer come as news, but it’s definitely worth commenting on. Greta Christina sums it up on Alternet, but in brief: A Louisiana public high school student, Damon Fowler, objected to a…

I’ve been reading Bob Curran’s book Unholy Popes, an extremely amusing chronicle of papal misbehavior over the centuries and the more infamous scandals and shenanigans attributed to the various men who’ve held the seat. There have been periods of decades when Rome was rife with corruption, nepotism, bribery, and at times, open warfare and murder…

Since we’ve been reading a lot lately about scientists pandering to religion, it’s worth remembering that there’s nothing new under the sun. As long as there’s been science, there have been believers who fought fiercely to prevent their god of choice from being dislodged from a gap, and there have been scientists who felt obliged…

I’m still working through a backlog of interesting stories that accumulated during my vacation, so here’s the first of them. As freethinkers know too well, claiming that your religion requires you to do or not do something is an almost all-purpose excuse for immoral behavior. It’s frustratingly rare for believers to be punished for wrongdoing…