Author: Adam Lee

Liberty magazine, a publication of the Seventh-Day Adventist church, has recently published “Faith Attack“, a polemic by Clifford Goldstein against the New Atheists. The entire article is little more than repetition of the modern equivalent of the medieval blood libel: that atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett want to take over the…

The formation of the state of Israel in 1948 was a tremendous excitement to apocalypse-cheerleading Christians. For the end times to occur as described in the Bible, Israel must exist, so it’s no surprise that its establishment following World War II convinced many believers that the end times were on the way: There is little…

The New York Times recently ran a depressing article about the obstacles faced by public school science teachers. I don’t envy teachers their job, as important as it is: between surly and unruly students, cash-strapped school districts, incompetent administrators, and the regimented, monotonous teaching needed to drill classes for standardized testing, they have more than…

By Michael Martin (Editor’s Note: Welcome to Daylight Atheism’s newest guest author! Most of you, I hope, have heard of Michael Martin, a professor emeritus of philosophy at Boston University and prominent author of books and scholarly papers defending atheism and naturalism. Some of his many published works include Atheism, Morality and Meaning (2002), The…

A famous Christian gospel hymn titled “This World Is Not My Home” sums up how religious views of an afterlife shape believers’ views of this life: This world is not my home,     I’m just a passing through, My treasures are laid up     somewhere beyond the blue; The angels beckon me     from heaven’s open door, And…

In his 1651 book Leviathan, the Enlightenment political theorist Thomas Hobbes wrote that in the uncivilized, lawless state of nature, the life of humankind was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. Even in Hobbes’ own day, when a relative degree of civilization had been achieved, there was considerable truth to this. But in just the…

Anyone who’s familiar with Christianity knows that, in the last few decades alone, the Christian church has seen an astounding number of its powerful preachers exposed as blatant hypocrites. The most famous example, of course, is Ted Haggard, former president of the National Association of Evangelicals and a fervent opponent of gay marriage, who fell…

In case you haven’t heard, Kay Hagan is the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate seat in North Carolina, running against Republican incumbent Elizabeth Dole. Yesterday, Dole and her staff put out a press release attacking Hagan… for planning to attend a fundraiser held by atheists. (HT: Friendly Atheist). According to Dole’s press release: “Kay…

Today’s post on critical thinking concerns the five principles collectively known as Mill’s methods, first presented together in 1843 by the Enlightenment philosopher John Stuart Mill in his book A System of Logic. Each of them is intended to illuminate the flow of causality in a different way, giving us mental tools to link causes…

Thanks to revelations that the U.S. government has been using torture techniques such as waterboarding on people it suspects of being terrorists, this post is overdue. I find it unbelievable that, in the year 2008, it’s actually a point of contention whether torture should be legal or not. Discussions of this issue in the media…