Author: Adam Lee

According to the vast majority of religious believers (though perhaps not to the tiny minority of elite theologians), God is basically in nature like a larger and more powerful human being. He has plans and desires which he takes actions to fulfill; he likes some people and things and dislikes others; he experiences emotions like…

About two weeks ago, the following comment was posted on the thread “The Aura of Infallibility” by one of the Christians whom I originally quoted in that post. There were some other discussions going on at the time and it fell off the recent comments list before it could attract any replies, and I thought…

Now that’s how you do it: This banner will soon be going up at the Loudoun County, Virginia courthouse, courtesy of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. Rather than remove a nativity scene from the courthouse lawn, the county board of supervisors voted to keep it, requiring the creation of a limited public forum where other…

Hudson Highlands Nature Center, November 2009. Photo by the author. Camera details: Canon PowerShot SD1200 IS. Click for larger version.

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 7 Earth’s Size Gonzalez’s next assertion strikes me as highly dubious. He claims that, if the Earth were larger than it is, the higher surface gravity would tend to smooth out mountains and ocean basins, producing a perfectly spherical planet with little surface relief. (He provides no numbers on…

By JulietEcho Editor’s Note: This piece emerged from the discussion of my recent post on the legality of polyamory. Please welcome Daylight Atheism’s newest guest contributor, JulietEcho, who has her B.A. in both Philosophy and Religious Studies and is also the administrator of the Friendly Atheist forum. You can e-mail her at [email protected]. I’ve been…

In January, I wrote about the Pakistani Taliban: All that is worst in the human spirit, all that is savage and low and cruel, finds its expression in the Taliban. They are amoral and nihilistic fanatics who never create, only destroy – whether it be the Buddhas of Bamiyan, the girls’ schools in Swat, or…

Back in January, I alluded briefly to the events in Uganda, where Christian abstinence-only programs have reversed the success of comprehensive sex ed and led to a rise in HIV infection rates. At the time, I mentioned Martin Ssempa, a pastor in the country’s booming Pentecostal Christian movement, and his involvement in a campaign to…

For the holiday season, some goodies this weekend: • First up, some music for the season: the blogger Lirone, of Words That Sing, in collaboration with William Morris, composer in residence at the British Humanist Association (did you know the British Humanist Association had a composer in residence? me neither!), has written a humanist carol,…

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 7 Most of chapter 7 focuses on Guillermo Gonzalez’s “privileged planet” hypothesis. This argument, as he uses it here, consists of listing every way in which our planet or our solar system could have been different, and concluding that every single one of them would be completely fatal to…