Author: Adam Lee

Last month, the U.S. government-funded National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine released a study which found that Americans spent $34 billion annually on alternative medicine. Although this is just 1.5% of total health care spending in the country, it represents over 11% of all out-of-pocket expenditures. The report estimates that about 38 million adults…

How much money do you give away each year? For the sake of full disclosure, I’ll start by answering my own question: I try to give at least $200 a month to nonprofit educational and charitable causes. I think it’s a reasonable amount, although I know I could (and should) be doing more. Speaking out…

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 4 Lee Strobel’s usual interview technique is to ask softball questions that are carefully phrased to make it as easy as possible for his interviewees to “refute” them. But credit where credit’s due – in the next section of chapter 4, he actually asks a good one. In talking…

For all DA readers in the Los Angeles area (if any): Three weeks from now, on the weekend of September 5, I’m going to be in California to attend a friend’s wedding. The weekend is booked solid, but my flight back to New York leaves from Los Angeles on Tuesday the 8th, and I’ll have…

Today’s edition of Poetry Sunday features a return of the English poet and novelist Philip Larkin. Born in Coventry in 1922, Larkin received a degree in literature from Oxford in 1943. Though he worked for most of his life as a librarian at the University of Hull, he was well-known and widely acclaimed for his…

In the days before Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation, we witnessed a strange spectacle: religious-right Christian after religious-right Christian spoke out against her nomination on the grounds that she valued empathy, and that this was an undesirable quality for a judge to have. Coming from a religion whose founder supposedly said, “Inasmuch as ye have done…

I don’t usually post on purely political issues, but this one has become impossible to ignore. In the last few weeks, the American right has worked itself into a fever pitch of insanity over the prospect of healthcare reform. If you’ve been watching the news, you’ve seen the shouting, raging protestors disrupting town-hall meetings, screaming…

Religion inspires billions of people around the world today to live honest, decent, law-abiding lives. Faith-based charities of every religious tradition have brought comfort, hope, and healing to millions of people who would otherwise starve, lay homeless, and be left to fend for themselves. Religion gives comfort and consolation to so many who have faced…

I’ve written about the ludicrous “space opera” beliefs of Scientology (the Plan 9 from Outer Space of modern religions). In the future, I want to tell the story of my personal encounter with Scientology proselytizers, but today I have another subject: some recent news exposés that reveal the secrets and the machinations of the cult.…

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 4 Strobel’s next interview is with Stephen Meyer, a philosopher who’s also one of the cofounders of the Discovery Institute. Strobel and Meyer touch on several topics (fine-tuning, irreducible complexity) that will be discussed in more detail in later chapters, so I’ll defer responding to those arguments for now.…