Author: Adam Lee

Via Ophelia Benson, this unwelcome news: the Center for Inquiry’s podcast Point of Inquiry, which I listened to regularly until now, is seeing a change in hosts. D.J. Grothe, who formerly conducted the interviews, is leaving to serve as the president of the James Randi Educational Foundation. He’ll be replaced by a rotating series of…

You get all kinds of weird and amusing religious literature on the New York subways, and here’s the latest proof: Click to enlarge. Also see interior and back cover. If you’ve attended a college with a significant Jewish population, you’re probably familiar with Chabad House, an organization that runs community centers and programs for observant…

As much effort as we freethinkers put into making atheism a viable and socially accepted option, it’s important to remember that it’s still a difficult feat to extricate oneself from religion when one’s family and social life are bound up with church attendance. Consider this e-mail I received a few days ago, whose author’s personal…

I’m happy to report that there’s quite a lot of good news this week: • The U.K. government recommends that primary school religious education classes should teach about “secular beliefs such as humanism and atheism”, in addition to learning about major world religions like Christianity, Buddhism and Islam. This is just one more symptom of…

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 8 In the previous installment, I discussed how creationists steer well clear of doing any real science. We can see another example of this in, ironically, the way Strobel falls all over himself lauding Michael Behe as a Real Scientist: He has authored forty articles for such scientific journals…

In the U.S., the cause of gay and lesbian rights has made major advances in the last few decades. Anti-discrimination laws are in wide effect, including a recently passed federal hate-crime law; marriage equality is already an established reality in several states; and despite setbacks, the now overwhelming tolerance and acceptance of gays and lesbians…

The world has seen and heard enough about the misery and destruction in Haiti this past week that I don’t think I need to dwell on it. But I do want to take some time to address the perennial question of theodicy, which comes up in the aftermath of every disaster like this. To an…

This photo is from my trip to St. Louis last weekend, taken from the base of the famous Gateway Arch. Besides the sheer scale of the structure, I was attracted to its stark, geometrical shape – almost like a mathematical equation in the form of a building. In the enlarged version, you can see the…

This week, the Dutch politician Geert Wilders appeared in court in his home country to face charges of “inciting discrimination and hatred”, which could carry a two-year prison sentence on each count. Wilders is, of course, the bomb-throwing right-wing populist whom I wrote about in 2008, made infamous by his short film Fitna (caution: some…

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 8 Chapter 8 is devoted to an interview with Michael Behe, the biologist and creationist who coined the concept of “irreducible complexity”. As I’ve already reviewed Behe’s book, I won’t spend a great deal of time rehashing the arguments given in my review. Suffice to say that there is…