Author: Adam Lee

Today’s Poetry Sunday features one of the classics of Western literature, written by one of its greatest and most fearlessly freethinking poets. Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in 1792 and wrote at the zenith of the English Romantic period. In 1811, while enrolled at Oxford, Shelley and his fellow student T.J. Hogg published a pamphlet…

A few months ago, I signed up for the mailing list of a site that has the chutzpah to call itself “Real Magic Spells“. Practically every single day since, I’ve gotten a highly entertaining e-mail from the site’s proprietor, one Frank Stevens, who endlessly boasts about how he’s the real deal, how his voodoo spells…

A few weeks back, I came across a charmingly nasty site called “Christian Cross Talk” whose author devoted his every entry to explaining in depth how and why he hates atheists and blames us for every problem in society. (Sadly, the site has apparently disappeared in the interim, or I’d give a link.) One of…

I’ve resisted commenting on this until now, but I have to give in. I’m sure you’ve all heard the story of Webster Cook, an unsuspecting college student who got himself into a great deal of trouble because he took a consecrated communion wafer home with him from church rather than eating it. On cue, professional…

I usually talk about heavy subjects on this weblog, but sometimes it’s nice to shift gears and have a laugh. Here’s one of my favorites, from an old post on the Usenet newsgroup alt.atheism: While on a business trip to Rome, the CEO of Tyson Foods manages to be granted an audience with the Pope…

The winter of 1777-1778 was a bad time for the American revolutionary army. General George Washington had encamped his army at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania – an excellent position tactically, but a source of terrible misery and suffering for his weary, poorly equipped troops. The Continental Army was assailed by bitter cold and plagued by chronic…

In 1999, Time magazine named Albert Einstein its “Person of the Century”. The choice was understandable: In a global society increasingly underpinned by science and technology, perhaps no one person has had a greater individual impact on humanity’s understanding of the cosmos. Among his many scientific contributions, he discovered the special and general theories of…

One of the defining attributes of all the world’s religions through history is that they create imaginary crimes; that is, arbitrary rules the obeying of which helps no person, and the breaking of which hurts no person. In the beginning, many religions start off as simple, humble affairs; some even have the audacity to insist…

Is the power of the religious right declining in America? Several lines of evidence would seem to indicate so. Heading into the 2008 election, the evangelical movement is fragmented and leaderless, lacking a clear sense of enthusiasm or a preferred candidate to rally behind. Several important figures, including Jerry Falwell and D. James Kennedy, have…

Before the dawn of the scientific age, humankind had only its unaided senses to examine the universe. Certainly, there were awe-inspiring sights, but those alone give little insight into natural phenomena. At night we saw the stars and the planets circle overhead; each season we felt the rains fall and the wind blow; and in…