Author: Adam Lee

So, I’ve finally joined the 21st century by buying my first ever 3G smartphone, a Motorola Droid 2. I’ve been getting a lot of use out of it and I’m happy with the network coverage and connection speed so far. There’s also the Android Market, which lists thousands of user-developed applications you can download, everything…

• President Obama signs a law to fight British libel tourism by barring such judgments from being enforced in the U.S. • My esteemed guest author, Sarah Braasch, has an article in the latest issue of The Humanist on the French burqa ban. • After a scary brush with mortality, everyone’s favorite squid-loving atheist professor…

When America’s founders ratified the Constitution, they created something that arguably had never existed in the world before: a republic where freedom of religion was explicitly enshrined in the charter, where toleration wasn’t just the whim of a benevolent ruler but the immutable law of the land. As George Washington wrote in his famous letter…

There’s welcome news out of the U.K. this week: the government-established Charity Commission has ruled that the adoption agency Catholic Care must abide by anti-discrimination laws and therefore may not refuse to consider same-sex couples as prospective parents: The Charity Commission… ruled that discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation is a “serious matter” because…

The Language of God, Chapter 2 By B.J. Marshall Collins starts off this chapter noting that, if we’ve followed him this far, we’ve no doubt begun to form numerous objections. That’s an understatement to be sure! He gives us some of his own: Isn’t belief in God just a case of wishful thinking? Hasn’t a…

Street art, Manhattan, June 2010. Photo by the author. Camera details: Canon PowerShot SD1200 IS. Click for larger version.

I’ve been writing since the beginning of Daylight Atheism about the unique ways that religion harms women. Although men have also suffered innumerable harms from religious beliefs, they’re not singled out, treated as an underclass uniquely deserving of condemnation, the way that women are in almost every major religion’s sacred texts. That’s why I wrote…

When a new sect with strange and unfamiliar beliefs bursts onto the scene, it almost invariably meets with hostility (most of it from the old sects with strange and familiar beliefs). And depending on the nature of the newcomer, there are two common responses. It may stress its own virtue and righteousness all the more…

People who are ignorant of science sometimes speak as if the scientific method was some esoteric, arcane method of problem-solving, applicable only to a few highly specialized areas of inquiry and having no relevance to everyday life. But nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, the scientific method is just a more sophisticated,…

The Language of God, Chapter 1 By B.J. Marshall The chapter begins with a description of Collins’ experiences growing up. His parents shrugged off the business world and lived an agrarian life on huge tracts of land in the Shenandoah Valley. His father went on to teach at a women’s college. Collins was homeschooled, and…