Author: Adam Lee

Today’s Poetry Sunday introduces another renowned, classic author who was also an atheist: the English poet and scholar A.E. Housman. Housman was born in Worcestershire in 1859. His personal life was marked by tragedy: his mother died while he was young, as did four of his six siblings, and his father squandered much of the…

Under pressure from the ACLU, the Obama administration has finally released a set of four Bush-era memos from the White House Office of Legal Counsel. Written by assistant attorney general Jay Bybee and acting assistant attorney general Steven Bradbury, these memos detailed the torture techniques which the Bush administration believed could be used on captured…

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 1 At the close of the first chapter, Lee Strobel scales to an incredible height of lunacy: I knew intuitively what prominent evolutionary biologist and historian William Provine of Cornell University would spell out explicitly in a debate years later. If Darwinism is true, he said, then there are…

In last August’s post “Spread the Wealth“, I talked about the justifications for redistributive taxation. I felt that some of the issues raised in the comments deserved to be revisited – and since it’s tax time here in the U.S., it’s worth a reminder of why we pay them and what we get out of…

I last mentioned Guardian columnist and Templeton Foundation fellow Madeleine Bunting in 2007, in “On Being Uncontroversial“. She’s recently written another column attacking atheism, alleging that the New Atheists are drowning out, in her words, “real debates” about religion and faith. Personally, I don’t see the basis of her complaint. I think we’ve been provoking…

If you’re an American freethinker who’s envious of the success of the atheist bus campaign in Europe, this is your chance. The Freedom from Religion Foundation is launching its own campaign to put pro-atheist messages on buses and trains in America, with six ads already designed that feature quotes from famous freethinkers both historical and…

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 1 We pick up where we left off, with self-proclaimed former skeptic Lee Strobel interviewing a rural Appalachian community whose inhabitants were violently resisting the teaching of evolution. As we’ll see, Strobel believes a person can be fully justified in advocating creationism. Yet it seems improbable that these isolated,…

This week is the holiday of Passover, one of Judaism’s high holy days which commemorates the ancient Israelites’ deliverance from slavery in Egypt. Although the archaeological evidence for captivity and exodus is lacking, this story has become a fundamental part of Jewish cultural consciousness, as well as a symbol and an inspiration to others. In…

Last week, friends of equality had some very welcome news: the Supreme Court of Iowa has unanimously struck down a ban on gay marriage in that state. No blue state this, no liberal haven like California or Massachusetts that is so often demonized by conservatives and religious right bigots: Iowa is part of the mythologized…

Of all the essays I’ve written for Ebon Musings, one of my favorites is “Into the Clear Air“: a chronicle of the stages of deconversion, as told by people who were going through them. What shines through from these testimonies again and again is the pure relief, the freedom experienced by people who left behind…