Author: Adam Lee

Last month’s post “On Cryonics” outlined why I’m skeptical of that transhumanist doctrine. In today’s post, I want to discuss more directly the goal which advocates of cryonics hope to attain – the achievement of immortality through technology that gives us the ability to halt or reverse the aging process. In this case, my objection…

Why don’t we already have gay marriage in all of America? I mean this as a simple question of law, not a matter of fundamental rights or justice. The reason I ask is because we already have legally recognized gay marriage in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and because Article IV of the U.S. Constitution contains the…

Friendly Atheist has posted the third part of a dialogue with Christian apologist Lee Strobel. In it, Strobel poses questions that he thinks would be the most effective at planting seeds of faith in an atheist’s mind. In this post, I’ll answer those questions. I’ve written on some of these issues at greater length in…

Although it’s much too early to look forward to a world without religion, one thing we can be confident of is that the numbers and influence of atheists will continue to grow in the near future. Census figures over the last few decades have consistently shown the rise of the nonbelievers in the educated and…

This past week, the Times ran a story about the extent of the gains made by the reconstituted Taliban, not just in Afghanistan or in the semi-autonomous tribal regions on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, but well within Pakistan itself: Using a portable radio transmitter, a local Taliban leader, Shah Doran, on most nights outlines newly proscribed…

I knew the Catholics were having trouble finding enough people to be clergy, but I didn’t think things had gotten this bad (HT: Pam’s House Blend): I believe that the historical evidence — the historical evidence — is hugely against six million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of…

In the world of Philip Pullman’s fantasy series His Dark Materials, each human being is accompanied everywhere by their daemon, an intelligent animal-shaped spirit that is the outward manifestation of their soul. When Pullman’s heroine, Lyra, meets a boy who’s been severed from his daemon by a cruel experiment, her reaction is one of disgust…

On May 13, 1917, three Portuguese children in the town of Fátima, a small village seventy miles north of Lisbon, claimed to have witnessed a vision of the Virgin Mary. According to the account given by Lúcia Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto, Mary had appeared to them, clad in luminous white, above…

On November 4, I decided that it’d be worthwhile to read the two books written by our new president Barack Obama, to get a better sense of where he intends to take the country in the next four (hopefully eight!) years. I finished the second one just before the inauguration, and here follows a brief…

• I’ve posted a new revision of the comment policy. The first version of this policy was too short; the second one, I think, was too long, and misguidedly tried to enumerate every forbidden behavior while eliminating every possible loophole. I think that was a mistake, and this newest revision is intended to be more…