Author: Adam Lee

On a brighter note, the Camp Quest fundraising contest pitting the atheist blogosphere against PZ Myers has come to a close… and as the smoke clears, a tattered flag is waving defiantly among the heaps of squid. Yes, the once unthinkable has happened: Barad-dur has fallen, the Death Star has been destroyed, and our motley…

Hi folks, Now that I’m rested, I’ve been catching up on the posts written by my guest authors, as well as the 200+ comments they attracted. I’m mostly up to date now, and I have to say a few things about the way they were treated. In particular, I want to speak to Leah’s posts…

By James A. Haught Osama bin Laden achieved a remarkable feat: He mobilized the power of religion to spur devout young men to kill themselves in order to murder defenseless strangers. Grotesquely, the suicide-killers felt they were performing holy acts that would please God and assure them martyr rewards in paradise. The annals of faith-based…

By Ebonmuse Greetings, all. I’m back safely from Spain – actually, I was back yesterday, but pretty much went right to bed when I got home to sleep off the jet lag and recover from general sleep deprivation. (You see, we were in Barcelona on Saturday night, which was when the home team won an…

By Ebonmuse Greetings all, As I mentioned previously, I’m away this week, having gone to Spain with my wife to celebrate our first anniversary. My only regret is that because of this trip, I was out of the country on May 21, when self-appointed prophet Harold Camping told us that the Rapture would absolutely, definitely…

Last month, I wrote about the hideous spectacle of ordinary religious people defending genocide because it’s commanded in the Bible – with some of them professing to not even understand why nonbelievers would have a problem with this. Greta Christina also highlighted this horrific mindset in the writing of William Lane Craig, the renowned Christian…

I noticed a few stories this week that I haven’t had time to write more about, but wanted to mention briefly: • So-called “psychics” defraud their gullible customers out of thousands of dollars, usually through laughably obvious ploys in which they claim the client’s money needs to be “cleansed”. Can we please regulate these con…

The kingdom of Saudi Arabia, ruled by an absolute monarchy in cooperation with the vicious and medieval Wahhabist clerics, has some of the most oppressive and primitive laws in the world when it comes to the rights of women. Saudi women are forbidden to appear in public without a face-covering veil and a full-body shroud;…

As I mentioned earlier this month, today is my first anniversary, and to celebrate, my wife and I are taking a vacation abroad. (We’ll be going to Spain, where hopefully I’ll be able to avoid the vicious hordes of elderly Catholics.) We’ll be away from this coming Friday until Memorial Day weekend, and I’ll probably…

This past week, on a sunny spring day, I went on my lunch hour to see a new public art installation in midtown Manhattan: This exhibit, “Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads“, is noteworthy for being created by the internationally famous Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. After being chosen to design the “Bird’s Nest” stadium for the 2008…