Author: Adam Lee

To commemorate the Fourth of July, here’s this month’s Poetry Sunday. American readers will likely recognize today’s poem immediately, as well they should: it’s engraved on a plaque mounted on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. But what may not be as widely known are the freethought sympathies of the poet. Emma Lazarus was…

To mark the tenth installment of Popular Delusions, I’m turning my attention to one of the most common and enduring superstitions among the New Age set: the belief that naturally occurring crystals have some sort of special power to store, concentrate, or focus vaguely defined “energies”. A web search readily brings up hundreds of sites…

Much head-scratching has been occasioned by the Pew Forum’s latest report from its U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, which found, among other things, that 21% of atheists claim to believe in some sort of god. I’ve linked to a press release from the Secular Coalition for America on this finding, and I’d like to add some…

Geert Wilders is a Dutch politician, an elected member of that country’s Parliament, infamous for his right-wing views on immigration and social policy. In 2008, he released a short film, Fitna, which criticizes Islamic radicalism by interspersing video footage of terrorist attacks with quotes from the Quran and from prominent Islamic religious authorities praising the…

Today’s post on morality takes up the topic of forgiveness for wrongdoing. In superstitious times, forgiveness was obtained through magical rituals. Most of these assumed that guilt could in some fashion be transferred to an animal or other being, which was then killed or driven off to provide a symbolic expiation. Leviticus 4 explains: Say…

The number of different religions on this planet is vast, and all their associated arguments and apologetics form a library that’s vaster still. No matter how well-read or well-traveled any atheist is, they’re bound to run into claims every so often that they’ve never heard before. It happens to me at least once a month,…

The other day while browsing in the library, I found out that Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, authors of the Left Behind series, have also written a trilogy of prequels. (As long as Christians continue to purchase these awful books, it seems, they intend to keep churning them out.) The final installment of this trilogy…

I have two short announcements to bring to your attention: • Daylight Atheism commenter Eshu has started his own blog, Bridging Schisms. If the first few posts are any indication, it ought to be a fine addition to the ranks of the atheist blogosphere. Go check it out and tell him I sent you! •…

Today’s installment of “Do You Really Believe That?” will leave behind Judaic and Christian mythologies to examine a doctrine specific to Islam, the doctrine of abrogation. This belief holds that Allah originally revealed certain practices and rules to Mohammed, only to later issue new revelations which canceled the earlier ones and instituted different practices in…

Summary: Brilliant, brave, inspiring. Read this book. In 2004, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered in the street by a Muslim fanatic, Mohammed Bouyeri, who was enraged by van Gogh’s production of a film titled Submission which criticizes the mistreatment of women in Islamic societies. Van Gogh’s murderer shot him eight times, cut…