Author: Adam Lee

Earlier this month, I wrote about how Hanukkah’s prominence was the plan of reformist rabbis, seeking to create a Jewish holiday to compete with Christmas just as Christmas was created to compete with pagan solstice festivals. In an ironic sense, this campaign has been both a success and a failure: although the cause of Hanukkah…

In past years, I’ve used the occasion of the winter solstice to deliver a brief homily on an issue of moral importance. This year, I’d like to do so again. Although nearly every society has put its own religious or cultural gloss on it, the solstice is an event marked and commemorated by all of…

This year, as they do every year, the religious right is engaging in its annual bout of paranoia and conspiracy-mongering over the supposed secular plot to ban Christmas. Fox News, Christian-right groups, and other outlets in the culture war publish TV segments like “Christmas Under Siege“, books like John Gibson’s The War on Christmas: How…

Via multiple sources (Greta Christina, Pam Spaulding, Glenn Greenwald, Americans United, as well as others), this unpleasant news: President-elect Barack Obama has apparently chosen megachurch pastor Rick Warren to give a speech at his inauguration day. If you’re not familiar with Rick Warren, or if you only know him as the author of The Purpose-Driven…

One of the great virtues of market forces is that they consistently reward investors who can correctly predict future events. Whenever two people disagree about the plausibility of some event, you can create a financial instrument whereby the one who’s right can profit at the expense of the one who’s wrong. The Christian community in…

Pandagon‘s recent post on Carlton Pearson, and the comment thread there, got me thinking about the question of inerrancy. Last February, in “The Aura of Infallibility“, I observed that the apologist’s claim of scriptural inerrancy is really a claim of personal inerrancy. Even if I believe a book to be without error, I must rationally…

I haven’t featured any compositions by the freethinking poet Philip Appleman lately, so with this edition of Poetry Sunday, I intend to address that. This is an especially lovely piece by Prof. Appleman from the November 2007 edition of the FFRF’s newsletter Freethought Today, one I’ve been wanting to reprint on Daylight Atheism for some…

By way of Pandagon, I came across this incredible story from NPR’s This American Life, an hourlong report on, and interview with, the evangelical pastor Carlton Pearson. Pearson was once one of the rising stars of the religious right: a hardcore Pentecostal preacher, head of an Oklahoma megachurch, a protege of Oral Roberts and a…

Today’s edition of “Strange and Curious Sects” concerns a now-defunct religious group, but one which has offshoots that survive to the present day. Like the stories of John Frum and Sabbatai Zevi, it’s also a lesson in the almost limitless capacity of the human mind to rationalize away disappointment. William Miller was born in 1782…

Last week, in “Getting Our Message Out“, I wrote about the winter solstice sign that the FFRF posted in Washington state’s capitol building. The sign was put up after the state had legally obliged itself to create an open forum by allowing the placement of other privately sponsored displays carrying specifically Christian-themed messages, including a…